Extended Practice: Creating a Live Action Video for Reference Material

To help me better understand the timings of each shot I will be animating, I decided to with the use of live action actors, film every shot and edit it together almost like I have a live action version of my animation. I initially just went straight into it by choosing random shots to film with whoever I found to be available at that moment in time. This turned out to be a completely inefficient way of working as with 123 shots to film I lost track of what I had/had not done fairly early on. Therefore I decided to create a shot list...

With the shot list created I gathered together a team of people I felt resembled similar physicality's or at least believed could act out the physicality's of the characters and proceeded to film every individual shot.

Above are just a few of the around forty individual shots I ended up filming. Since first year I have always chosen to use this method in my pre-production of filming the scenes I needed to animate with live-action animators. Obviously I would not apply the same technique if I was animating more abstractly with characters who do not follow the laws of physics. But due to the fact that this animation is very focussed on character, in particular realistic human characters, I needed to make their physicality's as realistic as possible. 

In order to animate their physicality's in a way that they express realistic emotions I needed to capture these emotions on film as I feel I am not strong enough an animator to create realistic emotions in characters without some form of reference.

For the most part, I felt like this exercise was worth doing. But it did get to a certain point and I did feel like the quality was beginning to slip. This was not down to any of my actors but instead down to me and my skills at direction. I was conscious of the fact that I was using real people and the time of real people. Most of the people I was using were not actors and were in fact my peers so in order to get performances I could successfully reference, shots would take a bit of time and practice and often need multiple re-takes. I knew down the line I would not regret doing this and I will thank myself for providing myself with plenty of reference footage to use. But at the time I really wanted to just get it done as soon as possible, that is why the quality of my Live Action Video noticeably slips towards the end.