Artefact Two

07:35 Research Module 0 Comments

Through relating back to my research document  and studying further reading into subtext I noticed an interesting clip in the ‘Incredibles, 2004’ animated feature film. At the beginning when Mr Incredible is being interviewed he says ‘who enjoys the pressures of being super’. Through subtext, Mr Incredibles body language says something completely different than to his dialogue. He shows that he actually does enjoy the pressures of being super. This is something that has inspired me, by noticing subtext within acting films and clips than I didn’t before I researched further.

I chose a clip from the Requiem for a Dream, 2000. I felt as though the subtleties in what the character is saying could be used well to express subtext.

I decided to show the clip without the dialogue being played to see whether the audience still connected to the character the same.  As quoted ‘If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.’ (Alfred Hitchcock, 2012) I feel this was something vital to test whist studying the use of subtext. 

The feedback from the clip without dialogue was quite positive. They could sense that she was upset and quite annoyed from her facials expression and mainly her body language looking down, not really looking up that were good acting choices to portray what she was feeling. From this I showed the same audience the scene with the dialogue to see whether they felt the same.

The feedback from my focus group was positive, meaning the animation seems to be animated a lot better than my first Artefact. In my original pass at this animation the focus group mentioned that there wasn’t enough movement in her hips, especially when she moved her hands to left and right. There should still be some twist within the lower body when she makes these gestures. The group also pointed out that the movement of her hand gestures should be on particular words of the dialogue, such as ‘bed’ and ‘dishes’. As shown in the Artefact above, I improved what was discussed and also added other extra subtleties.

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n terms of feedback for the overall subtext within the performance, the audience seem well connected with the character’s inner feelings and thought process, showing that she is upset, annoyed and lonely. They felt the same yet more emotion when the dialogue was heard. This feedback also included people with no studied animation background. However, I felt that there wasn’t enough contrast between the dialogue and the thought process, like in the ‘Incredibles, 2004’ clip I mentioned above.  I feel I could have used operative words to capture a stronger subtext performance, though the audience still believed it portrayed a good experiment of subtext.

Following on from this Artefact, I thought this would be a great opportunity to continue the feedback and research to start my next Artefact about blinking. As Shawn Kelly says “If the body is 90% of the acting performance, the eyes are 90% of the facial performance. After considering what the body will be doing, the next most important thing is definitely your eye performance.”(Shawn Kelly, 2009).  I feel this is a strong piece of research to discover, as the main use of blinking is through a character’s thought process.