Character Development - Week 7 - Creating a Scene

In this weeks lesson we looked at how to write a scene for our character and then perform the scene to the class.

Good acting is being believable and interesting enough that the audience is engaged with whatever you are doing. You can achieve this with a decent script and a good scene.

We looked at Charlie Chaplin's film 'The Kid' - Charlie Chaplin is forced into an extreme situation and it is funny to see how he handles having to raise a kid. You realise after watching the scene that you pick up some of the personality of his character without even realising. For example he is good at making contraptions that help him look after the baby and so is intelligent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgnEJgvb7fM

Another clip we looked at was the Lift scene from the film 'You've got Mail' Again set in extreme situation each one of the characters personalities start to appear and you get to see the real them and how they would handle things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7eMH8QoMZk

 We also looked at the show 'Who's line is it anyway?' which is an improvisation show where comedians act as different characters.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNV8_lVmSyw

We looked at this show to help us with our next task which was to create a scene for our own character and then act it out in front of the class. If we struggled to act out our own character then it would be a struggle to animate it.

 There is a famous saying: ‘Animators are actors with pencils.' 

Classwork:

Bethany and I help each other with our scenes. I struggled with this task as my character becomes characters in the books to get over her anxiety and because of this it was hard to see what her real personality was.

My first scene was that Molly could be in a library struggling to carry a massive pile of books and collecting more as she went and becoming more and more excited. When she reached the desk to check them all out she was told that she could check out 3 at a time and you see how disappointed she is.

My next scene was she would be reading a book and be getting really into it, as she gets to a good bit she suddenly turns into the main character and starts to act out the scene.


After the class seeing both of these scenes they chose the second one but I also got feedback about maybe he being sucked into a book or diving/ jumping into a book and seeing what she does once she is actually in the pages. I will take this forward and work on another scene for next week.


 

 IDEA IN CLASS AND VIDEO OFF BETHANY