 It's Thursday and that means Acting Analysis Day and today I'm going to talk about the movie Take Shelter. Take Shelter is a fantastic movie. I love that movie. I'm gonna go through a couple of things. I'm gonna start with the small scene at the beginning. I'm not gonna spoil the whole thing but towards the end there will be a scene that will somewhat spoil a character development but this is so long. There's gonna be part one of Take Shelter and it's gonna be probably three, four, five parts not maybe every week but in a couple of weeks I'll bring it back and I can scrub through what we have here. I want to talk about this beginning scene just because it fits into tomorrow's FNA about weather and how people react to it. Today I'm going to talk about this scene. We have an awesome scene coming up with that especially this going on. Then one of my favorite scenes is this. So good. So much to talk about. Then of course followed up by this fantastic scene. Oh this is so much good stuff here and then this which I could potentially skip. This is kind of a recap and then I don't want to go too far into this because it's awesome. I highly recommend you watch the movie. Like I said absolutely love the movie directed by Jeff Nichols. He also did Mud and Midnight Special and Loving. I haven't seen that one yet but I absolutely love Take Shelter. Let's take a look at it right now. It starts off fairly, fairly slow and I show this in class at the Academy and also for mentor students. I'm gonna show the whole sequence but for you I'm gonna skip forward to the second scene but just quickly there's something about as this happens how he reacts here with his eyes, wincing and if anybody has gone outside which I hope a lot of you and it's raining and you look up you're gonna have you know your eyes are gonna win stuff is going to go into your eyes. This could be something where it's smoky stuff in your eyes. I mean again this is going through for tomorrow. If there's anything that happens outside of the character in terms of heat, in terms of the weather or anything else you should have your character react to it and again it could give you opportunities for some fun acting and in this case you wonder why is he not reacting to this and it's not really water and so on and so on and the reason why I'm showing this in class as well is the transition between this and this where we hear the water sound and then it's the shower sound so you don't quite know if it is a dream or is it a memory so he's under the shower and he's thinking about it or it was a nightmare or it was real and he has to wash off that weird liquidy oily type of thing you don't quite know and it's a cool setup for the movie but it also kind of establishes him as this big giant that's just kind of pondering life stuff is on his face he's not running away from you know from whatever liquid that's on him it's a cool setup again I'm just going on and on because I love that movie let's skip to that scene so at the beginning you can see they're having breakfast his wife is cooking here and he has a dog and a daughter and technically he could just walk by say hi there's so many things you can do with your main character walking past his wife his husband the partner a dog family members roommates whatever it is could be like an evil look to your roommate who hasn't done the dishes or in like in this case his daughter and he has his touching and the kissing and he's very loving and affectionate and the thing is there's no dialogue there's nothing else in there but let's pretend that in your scene you have it could be a pantomime or it could be one character talking to another and throughout this whole scene where one character talks to someone that's either off screen or it's two characters you could have a third character in this case could be the daughter just kind of looking and passing by delivering the dialogue the secondary action could be how he says hi to the daughter or fixes something or helps her or maybe it's a little kid that puts on the shoes and he just talks to the wife or the wife talks to the husband and it goes down and ties the shoes or could be whatever business but that extra character that again doesn't have to have audio or lip-sync it doesn't have to be that much extra work but it gives you a chance for your main character or multiple characters depending what you're seeing is to show how they relate to other characters so this could be a character in a park a classic scene where a bad guy walks past the kid with a balloon and he has a little needle or a cigar or something and pops the balloon again that little secondary thing and how he interacts or how she would interact with someone else can tell oh that's a villain or that's someone that's really affectionate and nice and caring or completely on drugs and somewhere in the clouds or not care or whatever it is so it's short it's a short scene and I'm going to go through the other scenes in the future I don't want to take the whole thing again this would be like a two or three hour long acting analysis so I'm gonna keep it short but I think it's something that I rarely see in acting clips and even in animated features I mean they're not that many fully functional families the Incredibles has a lot of fun into place between the family a lot of times one of the family members is missing because you want to stop your character where the main character has a tragic loss and they have to overcome that and fill that gap with something else a new character something else it could be a classic story arc like that but if you have in your scene could be a test or whatever it is and you have other characters full family or again could be roommates or could be just friends somewhere you can have that where someone maybe someone sits next to a friend and how they interact quickly glimpses or like I talked about in true detective when someone gets a play of food or whatever takeout food they could hand it without looking or do they have to look just the interplays the interactions the eye contact the lack of eye contact or how long do they look is it uncomfortable or whatever it is you can use that to your advantage and I think in this case is really cute and for me resonates because I do that with my little six-year-old I smell his hair I pinch his little cheekies and he's still at that age where he likes that maybe I don't know but I see this and I can relate and I think it's important that in your shots that you have something where the audience goes oh yeah this is this is familiar I know it is oh this makes me happy seeing this or this makes me sad it's like when you see an entangled you see the horse that kind of acts like a dog because a lot of people have dogs probably I don't know if it's more than horses but you're probably very familiar with dogs so you see the scene and like oh the horse acts like a dog that's funny so if you have something like a fantasy creature an alien whatever it is that has a form that you don't really understand on top of that with some weird alien noises where just everything is alien the the audience just can't relate it just going to be so foreign that there might be a disconnect so a lot of times when we do creature work at work we try to find even if it's a fantasy creature we try to find some animal creature that humans know that they can relate to and we put those characteristics and animal behavior into that fantasy creature so they can go and they as in the audience how I know this this looks familiar I don't quite know what it is but I think I know and I think it's okay I can look at this and not feel like I don't know what this is the weirdest thing ever I'm gonna disconnect and not follow that movie anymore but anyway going back I think this could be really cool I think you can use that in your scenes and again it could be a small thing this is fairly short it could be something I mean not that your your parent to go by and and smack the kid over the head but it could be something where maybe the kid does something that the kid is not supposed to do and the parent walks by stops still delivering the line to the other person but breaking eye contact looking down still talking and maybe tapping on the hair or tapping on the cheek or the kind of putting the hand on the shoulders putting some weight to kind of distract the kid from whatever the kid was doing maybe putting the hand on the freshly painted wall whatever it is right so there's a lot of things you can do and again this is short but I think really important and something that's overlooked and I overlook maybe maybe not used enough and again this is take shelter I highly recommend you watch it because it's so awesome if you have let me know let me know in the comments I'm very curious because I don't know how many people I've seen every time I ask them have you seen take shelter no they don't really know about it so any fans out there let me know let me know in the comments if you like this give this a like that my usual spiel at the end subscribe hit the bell button for all the notifications because I upload every day if you watched the whole thing till the very end with your very precious minutes thank you so much I really appreciate it and if you want to keep watching tomorrow is Friday that means FNA Friday and the last part of how an environment makes your animation better and if you're still here thank you again