My fourth artefact involves a character performance using no dialogue, sound or cinematography. Therefore the story telling was completely up to myself and how I portrayed this to capture my character’s inner feelings with the audience.

When planning what my character was going to do and it’s back story, I researched some existing pantomime character animations to see how they express body language without sound. I found that the acting choices for doing a character performance without dialogue are even more important to be able to capture the audience, as the audience is basing it solely on the animated performance.

After research and planning I decided again, to animate a more subtle and emotional scene involving a young girl that see’s a letter on the table, goes over to read the letter and then shows her final reaction. I feel this was going to work well due to the build up through the story telling. The audience will be waiting to know what her reaction is going to be after reading the letter.

Following on from subtext and blinks, I felt this gave me a huge opportunity to expand on these within this Artefact.  After reading a quote from Shawn Kelly “When we’re having an idea, or when we’re switching from one emotion to another, or when we’re realising something. Those are the gold-mines in terms of blinks – that’s when a perfectly placed blink will take a scene from being merely ‘good’ and make it ‘great’.” (Shawn Kelly, 2009) it made me focus on my character’s big change of emotion during the scene, which is where this quote and blinking becomes vital.

For this particular Artefact I decided to act out the scene myself as a reference. As spoken about in my research document. This was good to focus on the natural movements that I made and improved my skills when animating the scene. In the focus group I showed the animation with my reference next to it and then another time without it. 

The overall feedback from the audience was good and they all felt the emotion I was trying to put portray. Although there was a little debate on what the letter was, some people thought it was a University acceptance letter and a couple of others thought it was a love letter. When writing a description for the background of the character, it was actually a University acceptance letter. However, either way everyone connected with the character in the same way.

Even so the audience felt the emotion they mentioned a few things about the poses and animating throughout the scene. The hands didn’t seem very natural, the head was posed quite vertical and some of the poses within the reference weren’t used as well as they could have been, such as the characters elbows were sticking out when mine in the reference wasn’t. However, they thought some of the acting choices worked well, when she holds the letter to where her heart is at the end means that the letter means something strongly to her.

With my findings for this Artefact I thought it would be great to expand it as my fifth Artefact by experimenting with sound and cinematography. I therefore took another pass at this Artefact which is the one shown above. I feel my conclusion on my final Artefact will determine whether sound can enhance the connection between the character’s emotions and audience.