 Welcome back! Today is Thursday and that means acting analysis for animators and today I'm going to take a look at a sequence from House of Cards. Alright, so today's going to be a sequence focusing on two characters and mainly about body language and kind of switching. One character is behaving a certain way and the other character is behaving another way and this is something that happens where they both switch. So that type of body language contrast is something I want to point out in this sequence so let's take a look at it. And the character we're going to talk about is this. It's Peter Rousseau in the series played by Corey Stoll, I believe that's his name. And it's about him and this character here. So you can see that, it cracks me already. This character, just that pose alone, I love it! When we talk about characters when they, not in this case was he's walking already, but sometimes you have moments where just that movement. He's very, I won't say cocky, but he's very confident and he's happy. Like today is a good day. And then she says, alright, this guy's waiting for you and he's already here. And you can see how the movements change with him, how he has to lean forward and look over. He's much less agitated. He's going, oh, no, it's that guy. And you can see also with her. I love this composition too with all the clean silhouettes, the clean staging is great. So again, look at how he comes in. I mean, that would be a great start for a shot that you do a cool walk, cool bottom mechanics has an attitude. And then a, you know, the typical gear change assignment that you do in school. And he has that here. He's got that moment to slow down. And that's just a fantastic pose. He's looking down. He's not looking up. I know he hears the character. He doesn't look at the character. You got that cool hand pose, finger pose, just that as a storytelling thing. You know that with a pose like this and this character looking down that you're not happy, angry, frustrated, but it's unlike, hey, buddy, good to see you. So something is going on and it's told by just one pose. So he can tell, yeah, oh, look at that. Look at those expressions are great. Oh, man, that's going to be fun. And just that look, look at that, like how long he looks. He got that expression eyebrow up and just how he takes that paper and then he goes in there. So now here's the thing. It's the body language between these two characters and how they change. So he enters and again, you would know, you would prefer to see it. You can definitely hear it, but he's not looking at him. So he already tells you something about his mood and be focused on him at the very end with the closing of the door. Again, he's still not looking at Peter Rousseau here. So then as he enters, he bends over. He wants to be nice. He doesn't expect him to get up and shake hands and look at his face. Look at that. Let's go back here. He's got the awesome expression. And look at that. I love this here. The look, he just looks and he doesn't really change the orientation. He keeps his hand up. It's a very specific thing of, hmm, okay, something's going on. If you do this, you don't really move and he don't really change your heads to follow the characters. Just his eyes. Look at just that moment here coming in the body language of going down and serving almost like, yeah, come on, come on, I want to help you. He does those very friendly gestures of engaging. And he is just in a specific mood. Just that, lots of movement. That's the main thing. There's a lot of movement and there's just absolute minimal movement. You can see this again with the head and it's just the eyes are following. So good. A couple of blinks there. All right. And he continues on again. Then he gets straight to the point. He's just like one little gesture and then he tells him. He confronts him with his type of problems and you can see constant movement. That's cool thing with the props. If you have someone in the chair, what kind of chair is it? Is it like mine? It should be louder now, but it's massively annoying. It's a cheap chair. I should have gotten a different chair, but you have my type of chair. That's very noisy. So maybe a chair that's noisy could be something in your shot. That's the conflict in the scene and it has to do something to overcome this problem like recording and then you hear this sound all the time. But in this case is a chair that swivels, which I have as well. So if you do have a prop, let's say you use a chair. Well, think about it. Is it a chair that has that pneumatic thing where the chair can go down and do something funny and how it goes down or up? Maybe there's a rotation that could be fun or maybe it's a chair on wheels. So you can kind of push a character off a wall to kind of wheel into scene. So again, any type of prop that you're using, think about why and what are the characteristics and the opportunities with each prop that you might want to use. So going back with all the movement here, look at that hands. He's got that big lean, lots of head movement. Look at that. He's so busy. He opens this. You might argue, is it to be more comfortable because it's stretching or is he slightly nervous, but it's mostly the stretching thing here to be more comfortable and look at that movement movement movement. And he's really leaning over while this character is not moving at all. Just straight like a wall. And you can see this continues on. Look at if you just focus on the head and the hands, constant movement. And here's the contrast. Let's go back here. Look at that movement, movement, movement, look at that head. So active. And then he got, fam, just hands here. And again, confronting him with, this is the problem and why not doing this? And he brings that in and you can see that. And I realized, okay, wait, there's a phone call. Sorry about that. And then he changes his little moments. Hey, please don't interrupt me. There's this person here. That's the line somewhat. I'm paraphrasing. And then you can see this. Look at this after all of this, all the movement, even the camera move focuses on him here. You got all that a change of posture, all the movement. Look at how he suddenly still look at that, that massive pause. And then I think he says the president elect. Yeah. And that, look at that. Ooh, that is an important phone call. So look at his eyes and now he's suddenly interested. And look at that, the economy of movement. So before that, look at this here, right? He has the swiveling on the chair. He's got the head. He's got hands opening up the button. All of this, all those movements, right? Constant movement. Let's go back to this here. And it's as if this character was an animator and he switched to pose to pose. Nerd. So yeah, this, right? He got from one, two, three. It's very, very methodical, shorter. Hey, I got to take this. Do you mind? And I look at him, look at this. He goes, oh, no, no, no, it's okay. Please, please, please look at that. The change. Now he's suddenly interested. Now he thinks, wait a minute, this guy's important. Maybe he can help me. Maybe I can use this to my advantage. And he's suddenly moving out of his shell. Look at that. He has to move. He changes his posture and get that little off-screen moment with the crossing of legs. And look at that. He's got that little smile there. Why? We don't see it here, but technically what he's done, he's actually has told her. They had this little thing here where she actually calls him. She's pretending that it's the president-elect. And that's just the game between the two to, you know, make it more interesting for the other character. You can see the continuation here crossing and see all that. Again, the change of posture and the change of interest. So if you do have two characters, as always, contrast is key. To me, contrast is super important in terms of visual detail, the posture changes, contrast in timing, you know, the colors, whatever you have. If you have two characters and they're not, that's the chair. If they're not contrasty, well, then maybe there's a reason for this, but in general, I mean, something for you real to think about is just contrast, contrast in timing. So there's texture to the timing and interest. But if you do have two characters, then think about that. How, how would they move and how are they different in posture? Generally in movement is one person always kind of nervous and fidgety. The other person more stoic and calm for the contrast. But then on top of that, I've seen in the sequence, maybe you don't want this to be like that all the time. Maybe there's some inciting incident where something happens in the scene and it causes a switch. So maybe it's just the opposite. So one person who's quiet becomes more active. The other person who's active was more quiet or it changes into not where they are opposites, but they just change themselves. So one person could be suddenly nervous or agitated or frustrated or sad, whatever it is. So it doesn't have to be a full opposite of what they were doing before, but it could change the behavior. And again, it serves as contrast and it serves as kind of a progression in the character and just general interest in the scene so that they're not always the same. There you go. That's it. That is the sequence from House of Cards and I don't know how long this is after the editing, but as always, if you watch this whole thing till the very end, I do appreciate it because you have other things to do than watching this channel. So if you are watching this channel, thank you so much. 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