 Welcome back today's Thursday and that means acting analysis for animators and today we're going to talk about Chernobyl, episode 4 and the next week episode 5 and then that's it. Lots of different things today so why waste time let's go straight into it. First off we have that short little shot of those three soldiers actually two soldiers and he is not a soldier as he says and it's all about contrast. I'm jumbling around in terms of the timeline this is more towards the end of the episode but what I want to take a look at is let's go here look at that he holds the gun like this he holds it like that he has it over his shoulder so in whatever if you have one or two I mean not one character but if you have two characters you want to think about contrast there have to be somewhat different and if you have three again think about the different poses the different ways of holding things all of that can be just a visual interest it can be a character difference in how they behave what they feel maybe he's really into this mission maybe he doesn't care maybe he's really angry about it so whatever you can do contrast is key unless unless you want it to be one two three or more and it's all repetitive there's always a reason for this so if I want to switch to something else here so if you're going to be repetitive you have cubicles right it's all the same it makes it monotone it makes it boring it makes it almost oppressive you're in this little cubicle in your life it's just duplicated and it's and it's cloned and you have no there's no contrast you have no individuality no purpose and if you want to put this into a movie you can think in terms of the Incredibles where you have the cubicles and cubicles and cubicles but then you can think in terms of contrast again because you have all the cubicles this pillar is going to stand out and his head is going to stand out so if you look at this that him being so big and this pillar here this is different than all of the other cubicles so you can use something as repetitive as a contrast point to your character or your scene or an emotion or whatever it is even in here and it's all repetitive all lined up that head peeking out is an interesting difference the interesting break into the repetitive lines of this composition now continuing on with this this is a classic stand-up assignment with variations so as always if you watch this channel i like to look at scenes and kind of analyze them and see more how could you use this in your shop you may be at school you have an assignment or you have a shop for your demo reel so technically he's sitting and he's getting up that and that that's a good body mechanics assignment for everybody to learn it's very important now how can you add more to this well you can have that that tells us he's either extremely sad or tired or frustrated or there's so many things you can read into this so now you have this overlying emotion this emotional state that drives the rest of it so he's waiting potentially for some news now you have the look first then you have also detailed stuff if you character as props or or clothing how he pulls that all that stuff and on top of that there is a wall so i'm always a big fan of sets so to add contrast and variation and asymmetry in your posing this helps so he puts his hand on here and then leans on it to pick up the phone that again changes the whole posing and it can add interest and contrast to your posing as well so if you think about an assignment oh stand up assignment is boring well think about this you can do it like that you can add something to your character so it's not just body mechanics and you can add more things like props to add more variation and interest now going back to this sequence here and this is a bit tricky to implement into one shop but i do want to point it out where the contrast in behavior and movement of a character so he's there for the first time watching how the characters are shooting at dogs it's a very sad assignment that they have so as they are pros he's kind of watching somewhat in horror or just not used to this and you can see the flinch right there as they shoot bam so as it continues you can see it's kind of the somewhat of a not super confident walk and then he sees his first target it's very sad he has to shoot they have to shoot the dogs with their their radioactive so you can see the kind of a hesitant walk he doesn't really want to do it and he ends up just kind of wounding the dog he's not doing a good job in not making it suffer contrasting to this right so now he's done this for a couple times the walk is much more confident he sees the dog shoots it there's there's a very clear strong stance he's not shaking he's not wavering he realized he didn't do a good job reloads without checking goes up and shoots it's a horrible sequence but i just wanted to point it out in terms of if you have characters and you potentially have more time to show change think about posing how the character stands how much the movement is changing the the you know the control of a prop and all that stuff can help you in kind of showing the change of a character and now there's something totally different it's a camera move but i'm not going to talk about camera that's a whole different fna i want to talk about just this move and how we are framing the characters and it's not exactly what i want to talk about but i want to use this as a springboard so if you have a shot like this your camera is on rails on a track and goes right to left you can show off i mean imagine the grass wouldn't be as high you can show off this main character yay you can show off full body mechanics and it could be something that's more broad it's further away bigger silhouettes and as the pen continues you can see here imagine this less grass you would have at least half of the character there and you can start incorporating a more facial features it's still body mechanics driven or in terms of you know seeing more bigger broader body actions and you can end in something where we are very close now imagine this character doesn't have a hat and all that stuff but you can end up with something where it's a full-on facial performance and i think that could be interesting change throughout the shot to go from wide to mid to close up and you can show up different skills in one shot speak of off-screen i like this one she calls someone in and waits and then as the character comes in here this could be an interesting introduction you have kind of a contrasting thing of again close up where you want to show someone waiting or looking at someone or judging someone whatever it is but i do like as this character comes in all we see it's almost tom and jerry style we just see the legs we only see this right now she's waiting here we only see the hands handling this now of course you can have a different prop it could be very aggressive stance it could be very nervous whatever you want to do but it's interesting to do a shot where you only see the body and again you can have a walk in a walk out or however that character is handling a prop or no prop but i think that could be an interesting composition interesting way to show off i can do this and it's in contrast to this and those two elements can play off of each other now speaking of prop he is done with this and this is just one of those many examples i want to show if your character has a prop how do you handle this what kind of push-off would it just be pushing from here to here so she has to make the extra step this could be something very arrogant where he doesn't respect her and makes her do all the job like all the work of getting there but you can argue maybe this is a bit more polite well i'm going to get this as far as i can but maybe you can interpret this this this last thing up as a bit more of a dismissive which i mean this case he is like here take this and not get out of here but it's just an interesting way of showing this and of course composition in terms of the power status and looking down all that good stuff you want to kind of look into into this shot if it's true or not but i do like this moment of the prop push-off and the way he does it and as always if you're handling a prop but even if not if you just have an arm movement think about what the movement is and how we are going to interpret this as an audience this is a bit more random not something you can use for your shop but i still want to mention it because as i was going through this episode they linger on this and this is the sound it's radioactive and it's almost now this is all death and decay and then as you go forward to this one he puts this out and again we linger on this and this is also causing cancer death and decay some parallels i don't know if i'm right but it's what i wanted to mention just quickly it's just interesting i just love the show and i want to end with some non-verbal answers and acting and gestures and looks it's mostly a look here and a facial thing so as he listens it's actually not not on him but he listens as this character is talking about their first kill so he's going to ask him do you remember your first kill and i love this character just he has a great face but look at his answer he look at eyebrows and right there that's all he does when he does ask him hey you know do you remember your first kill he does some secondary action stuff where he kind of looks at him i need to drink some more and he just does this i love that it's just this as an answer so when you add a second character it doesn't have to be a lot of work i mean i argue prop handling constraints it is a lot of work so maybe don't don't do this but if you have a character asking someone something and there's no audio you can still do something with that right your character doesn't have to be off screen you can have that second person even that person is saying nothing in the in the lip-sync in the audio piece you can have something like this and i love this it's just very subtle well i'm a subtle or not i mean it's it's broad enough for eyebrows but i love that as an answer and then within the show he actually doesn't talk a lot and it's kind of it's very in character except towards the end he starts talking and saying there you go that was it we have one more to go for next week i hope it was helpful to anybody who watched this if you watched this till the very end as always thank you so much i appreciate the time that you put in and if you like this you can hit a like if you have comments complaints concerns bribes comments are open if you feel like this could be helpful to your shots you want to work with me on your shots i do have workshops sign ups are open link in the description and if you want to know more about my channel subscribe hit that bell button to get all notifications because i do upload every day except weekends and that is it for me i will see you tomorrow and next week