 Welcome back it's Thursday and that means acting analysis and today I'm gonna talk about True Detective season 1. I was a big fan of season 1, not so much season 2 there are some good parts here and there but I really really like season 1 and today we're gonna talk about this specific scene you're gonna have a link in the description to the separate upload that shows the whole thing and I'm gonna go straight into the pieces that I liked. So as we have the scene it's already awesome in terms of body language how you have hands in pockets these guys the heads tilted it's already telling us how much they are enjoying being here there's something about opening a scene and having a character already in a specific pose that tells us something about their state of mind their emotional place so when you start your shot be really mindful of how is my character posed in a previous movie that I uploaded I talked about body posture how you can have a specific posture that gives us a certain inclination of how the character thinks and everything that you need to be mindful of when you start your shot so it's not just your T pose arms down and then you just kind of move the character make sure that the character in its rest pose is already in character so to speak so for them this is already awesome I love that relationship here already but you know they're still friendly they shake hands he seems to be the most open arms out there's something somewhat inviting about this these guys do not care whatsoever they're here because they have to but what I like about this is here this interaction so you have him holding food and you know they're looking at characters and whatever they're doing here and I love this this exchange is fantastic exactly this frame he is passing over food he just looks at the food because it's cutting his peripheral vision he will grab it and then that's it but the cool thing is that he doesn't look at him he doesn't look at him and to me this implies a certain relationship where this is not the first time they've done this their partners they work together he might give him food every Thursday or every day there's just something some routine that they have and he comes in here's your food oh yeah here's my food and just that gesture and the lack of eye contact to me implies history so there's more to those characters than just they're here eye contact talking and kind of going through their their one two three steps of these are my acting moments that I got to deliver this dialogue there's just something to it it's an interesting thing you can add to your shots where you can imply more interest in the scene you can have more interest between the characters there's more relationships between them and you can expand the scope of the shot the scope of your character and your character relationships without adding too much so again I'm a big fan of head accents and and head darts you know looks and but also eye contact and that to me is is a really cool moment of here's the food oh yeah thanks it's just some casual I would say ritual but just something that they're used to and it's just a routine that they have they continue to sorry this guy just cracks me up they keep talking they have their business here he keeps him up to date on what happens and this is another section here that I love hey I like how you have him looking over here it's very clear to the arms we got a look over here he stops his movement there's more movement here and he's just enough leaning to reveal this it's interesting staging with him in the middle there but I love what he goes uh huh and drops that he could just take this paper and go okay they're here or okay it's slide it but there's just some flippants type of really mm-hmm that's why they're here okay so that just that kind of that arc out in the kind of kind of throw of the paper every move that you do every gesture with the hand every eye dart every eye closing whatever you do just think of it not in terms of movement I have to go from A to B but think about well if I move this quickly or if I move my head slowly or quickly every single frame the timing of every move will tell us something about the character and how he or she feels how their relationship is between the characters what they think about this moment how they react to a certain moment just like in this case how he reacts to that piece of information which also reminds me of a cool little moment in Cameron Fielding's clip where you have an off-screen character with the newspaper kind of doing that flip that and it's such a cool little moment it's nice animation the timing is really neat and again just adds something to the shot that's just interest and cool showcase of timing to me it's always something where you have your main character and do your awesome animation awesome acting and then you can add in you can kind of sneak in high polish some interesting timing without making it the centerpiece it's like when someone has a tie and looks around and the tie is moving or in this clip by Yermol where you have the nun playing not playing but kind of you know she's kind of nervous and she plays with that prop and it's a prop that fits the character it's something that she would have but it's really well animated the polish is really good and to me it's not distracting but you can kind of show off your detail animation skills with something that supports the character just something that's part of the shot and i like those little details now i usually spend too much time on this where it gets kind of i go up on the tangent and animate that way too much just like in this shot where i animated something a long time ago from pitch black and the the bird flies through and there's all this stuff flying around i have way too much fun animating this stuff i highly recommend that you do this at the very end that you don't do this at the beginning i kind of get distracted and do this kind of in the middle instead of just as kind of a flourish so keep it as kind of an add-on and it's a cool simple little move but still it tells us something about how the character feels and it's all through the timing of how am i doing this arc hold out and then come back how quickly is this newspaper dropping down it's not very complex in terms of mechanics and complexities and constraints all kind of stuff but it still tells us something about the character then we move on to this here where he goes on and on tells him what's going on yeah yeah yeah he agrees and disagrees and the cool thing is this is a simple detail but again it's something that can expand your shot where it's not just this scene with this character and it's empty it's a good composition it's kind of in your thirds and everything has a little set that's cool but what i like about this here is actually this character in the back and you don't even need to have her in the previous shot if you just have a single shot that's this you can still have a hand coming in and they talk in this scene but they don't really have to it could just be a hand comes in coffee or whatever it is beer tea chocolates i mean it could be whatever right but it's an additional detail where your character can say something and it can perform and while he or she performs oh thanks grabs this and continues it's just additional business that to me is just interesting secondary action there's going to be a whole fna about secondary action where i'm just a big fan of characters doing something where it's not just for the sake of doing but like they're doing something that's part of their routine their daily life they're not in a vacuum like you know that matrix scene where it's just empty and there's presenting some performance to the camera they're going about something in the kitchen or they're folding laundry or they're in office grabbing things or in this case talking to someone oh thanks for the coffee it just adds life to me it adds like more to the world not just a simple character in an empty room it's just more to the scene interesting handoff that you can show in terms of animation detail work in the fingers in the posing how he holds his cup could just be this it could be something delicate it could be this and go and then because kind of that because it's hot so again you can show off whatever like little character details based on the prop i would just add a prop just for the sake of adding a prop but i think in this case it could be cool detail so he continues the same thing here in terms of eye lines he really is not a fan of this whole relationship and those other cops asking him for things he could just get up lean forward give him this folder you know could be maybe like here and then he waits for the person to reach forward and hands it off but no he just kind of throws it but without looking so if you look at this scene you can see how he just throws it looks somewhere else no eye contact you just disconnects from those characters he completely disrespects them he doesn't care what they do his head tilt couldn't be further he's gonna start falling over leaning over but you can see they're not very happy about this but i just love that little moment again it's all about eye line there's so much you can do with you staring at a character you're kind of kind of looking away there's something i'm going to post in the future about er there's the Dr. Benton he has this thing where he constantly looks away he's never able to hold focus he has no eye contact he just either he's nervous or he's embarrassed or he's just not comfortable or most of the times he's just kind of always thinking ahead always of something else he's never there and invested in the character that he talks to that's a different acting analysis movie for a later point but in this case again eye contact awesome here and then you got this little moment here where he has that yeah it makes you feel like real cops it's a little whatever potentially inappropriate gesture you can interpret maybe who knows again doesn't really care about them makes fun of them but what i like about this is that it's it's a gesture that's off-screen and one of the traps in animation is that you want everything to be very clean real nice silhouette now i'm not saying don't do it it shouldn't be confusing it shouldn't be a crappy silhouette at the same time not everything has to be all super clean in there and i'm a fan of performances where the character is just in character they just perform and you just happen to frame it this way and a close-up and a full body and you just capture a gesture or not and obviously if it's an important gesture that's off-screen and the audience misses the point then that's not well done but this is something where you can have gestures that are off-screen you can still kind of get what's going on you still understand the main action the main intent in the way it's framed just like in this scene from um warrior with Tom Hardy doing this this pointing gesture off-screen so he does this type of thing but it's it's off-screen but you can tell by the movement of the arm how he takes the body how he takes his head there's something going on you can kind of guess he's probably doing something like that you're not missing out when you don't see it but it still adds something to the performance where you don't just have everything still because that's how we frame it so to me i would always kind of look at what would be the natural performance even when you shoot reference act it out act it out the way you would do it gesture or not what's kind of the natural feeling for this scene and then you look at your framing i mean you would kind of act it out based on a framing that you chose beforehand but sometimes you kind of change the camera as you animate potentially but i would look at what's a natural performance if you need something very specific with something holding to camera or a specific acting moment with whatever you have obviously frame it correctly but there are moments where you can just do a gesture off-screen and then it's okay when you just have the the intent through that gesture but it's still off-screen right it doesn't it doesn't really you don't really miss anything when you don't see it then after this is probably one of my favorite things he is done with this conversation he turns around and he turns his back towards them he completely disconnects like i am done with this and they have this moment of this leaning like okay yeah that's it but they don't leave right away this they stare at him like i can't believe he's such a turd and what i love about this is a just this there's no audio he just does this full on acting with his body like i'm done with you but then i love this he doesn't quite completely sit down and he does sit but it's not a complete settle sits and holds and then he waits and again there's no real eye contact he just looks here and it's kind of a look of why are you still here i'm looking back i'm going sitting there going really it's not this would you please go it's kind of like why are you still here okay now i'm done it's that type of thing and i love that in the scene where you can see it again here sits down a bit holds and then he moves forward then he's done which of course everybody notices and he is even more ticked off and the scene continues so this sequence is not that long but there's so many good things in there in terms of eye contact when do you have it do you have it or not do you stare at your blink do you have interaction with other characters on screen or off screen do you have a natural performance that just happens to be framed like this but you still do some gesturing that's off screen but it's just a bit more natural that you just happen to capture like this and then looks and gestures or behaviors or passing along props just things you can show when you have two characters without actual dialogue you don't you can just imply your relationship by how they hand things off or how they look at each other or don't look or whatever you can imagine for your characters there's something that you can always add that's outside of your audio again you've heard this probably many times if you watch all my clips that i'm a big fan of adding acting choices outside of when the dialogue happens so you have more control so you can add your creativity to your shots there's more in this first season there's another clip that i want to show later on but that's it for now again there's a link in description if you want to watch the whole thing without any narration from me if you like this hit the like button if you want to see more and be alerted by all the uploads hit subscribe and hit the bell button and as always if you watched this whole thing until the very end thank you very much and i will see you tomorrow for an fna if you watch fna's otherwise see you next week