 Hello everybody it's Friday and that means it's F&A Friday and today we're gonna talk about part two of taking your shot to the next level. One of the classic assignments is a sit down. Character just stands and then sits down sometimes there's a variation of a character sits and gets up but a sit down assignment is something that I give to my students a lot and they usually get kind of a groan of just a sit down really it's kind of boring but to me there's so much you can do a it shows big variations in character posing from standing to sitting and the way aspect of someone getting down and sitting you can change so many aspects of that in terms of a the character in general is it a skinny person a heavy person is the character tired you can start adding layers of someone being drunk being tired being whatever or the properties of the chair or the object that the character is sitting on so there's so many ways to take that assignment and then escalate that into something more complex and that's just in terms of the body mechanics but on top of that you can add character so is the person in a hurry to get somewhere to grab the phone and call because they are missing their loved ones or it's a job application and they don't know if they're gonna get hired or not there's so many objectives that you can add to a character on top of this the general sit down assignment and sometimes you can just make something funny so in this example of this Instagram post the kid is sitting down that's technically your assignment but then what happens after that is interesting because he sits down on the luggage holds on to the handrail that then pulls him forward it's a funny character moment of a kid that is you can go either lazy or very intelligent and problem solving and how he wants to go from A to B but it shows how you can take technically just a sit down assignment and make that into a character piece to me this is more about the kid being smart and clever or whatever attribute you want to add to that and not about a sit down this just happens to show a character sitting down but it's more about what is the character doing in this situation to go from A to B because he or she doesn't want to walk and that's the main idea of the series is to what can you do in terms of how you can take a shot and make it not an exercise but make it more a character piece where the character does something and it happens to be a sit down it happens to be a jump happens to be a weight assignment the gear change all those things where it becomes secondary action it's more about the character what do we learn about the character in a great example for a sit down are these character studies from Big Hero 6 there are a lot of characters these are longer shots that might be potentially too long for students to take on but the variety of it and the complexities and the interesting aspects of how each character enters the room takes the chair sits down how to sit down do they fail in sitting down do they slip do they grab an object is there a prop that it can interact with there are so many ways where you can make this sit down interesting based on the character size the current state of mind how clumsy they are and of course you can escalate that even more words one character sitting down with all the things that we saw because they want to talk to another character there's more urgency because of some sort of relationship that forms and so on and so on you can add more and more and more to the shot to make this more complex but the overall idea to me is that you want to take an exercise and make it more about the character what does he or she feel what's their objective do they want something is there a conflict do they want to go from A to B or do they want something but there is something in their way how are they going to react to that problem that's going to be an FNA in the future all about conflict and how conflict exposes character but you can take all those elements and mix and match them into one awesome shot that goes from exercise to something advanced and something more character based and something that resembles more of a shot that you would see in the movie and not a sanitary clean shot of the character standing as always saying an empty room where it doesn't really apply to anything you would see in the movie because the hope is also that not only are you taking the shot to the next level but you're also practicing to have the character be aware and interact with the environment and other characters like in the movie like if you take a shot in a movie where the character has to be mindful of the environment and there is a before and after there is a character within a greater context with greater bigger picture so these series again are a reminder that you can make it more complicated not just to be complicated but to make it more interesting to add more character and for you to be a challenge to animate something that goes beyond just an exercise and thinking beyond that how would that apply to a company that I want to work for is that something that they do in their style what's the animation style what are you the usual characters that they use kind of the character traits and acting choices so all those things can prepare you and it's something for you to practice towards your end goal if your end goal is to work for company or if you want to make your own short movie or feature film all in all the through line is character as we are trying to be character animators you don't just want to animate you want to add character to your character and that's something that I always talk about in class and I know a lot of students are always somewhat tired of hearing that because it's something so easy for me to say and it's so hard to do for people working on the shots that someone did this and there's another meme but that is also a future FNA how to add character but for now I'm gonna leave it at that if you like this give this a like if you like to get notified about future uploads hit the subscribe button hit the bell button to get all the full notifications of all my uploads and as always if you watch the whole thing till the very end thank you very much for taking the time to do so and if you don't want to watch anything at all I do have a podcast and I'm going to upload all those lessons and ideas and topics so now it's really goodbye I will either see you next week or you can hear me through the podcast