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An Outpouring on the Theme of Dr Horrible
You thought I was over it, didn't you? Didn't you? Fools! I have been stockpiling! My dorkiness was too extreme to leak onto the internet in drip feed! I might have come to my senses and halted the flow. But now – now! – here it all is in one repository of such colossal dorkitude as may unbalance the very Internet itself.
By 'colossal' I mean some doodles, two drawings, and the world's shortest music video. It's not about quantity, though, people ... it's concentration. Sheer density. Tread with caution, you may encounter instability.
A little preamble (assuming you are actually reading this and not skipping straight to the images). I am an animator. I have always found my interest to lie more with acting and expression rather than action, which showed in my work at school, so I have spent years trying to get comfortable with moving characters around, to make up for my weakness in that area. I realized, upon starting at Disney, that in doing so I'd neglected actually learning anything at all about acting, and the gaping holes in that discipline were harder to fill in because it's so subjective.
Then, lo, what should appear in the land of the Internets but some very animated videos featuring a stage actor! Stage actors and animators both have to study caricature of movement and expression to transcend the limits of their medium (animators have simplified line drawings or virtual sculptures to work with, stage actors have to communicate across a vast distance). I've always heard one should study from live action, not animation, but most film actors are so subtle and naturalistic that you can't see what they're doing frame by frame, and I'm bad enough at caricature as it is, it seems counterproductive to make it that much harder. It'd be much easier to study what stage actors do, only ... they're on stage, and you can't stop-frame them. So here's a thing where not only does the camera linger within ten feet of a talented stage actor, but the production allows for caricatured stagey acting, and it's available in a format that makes frame advance and retreat an absolute breeze. You just pause it and use the arrow keys to move forwards and back – this works in Quicktime as well as iTunes. There's some really great material in there (I might be persuaded to post my favourite scene to stop-frame if anyone is interested in it but me) and I've spent more time this week poring over walks and expression changes than I'd like to admit.
Dr Horrible's climactic song has an especially high concentration of great cartoony expressions, so I focused on that for drawing from the screen, with the aim of both improving my expression vocabulary and figuring out Neil Patrick Harris' odd facial structure (and how expressions manifest themselves on it). It was ... really hard. Which is probably a good thing. The biggest challenge was pushing the expression so it was as strong as the one on film (ideally it'd be stronger, but I'm not there yet) and make it still look like him.
Here are a few of the more successful attempts:
At some point I realized I had seen this facial structure before, in a way ...
Right. So. All this work establishing a caricature/design to use is kind of a pointless reflex, in this case, because all the best moments have already been done, and done way better than I could do. All that's left are stupid gags. Oh well, I've learned stuff ... that's important, right?
I ... this ... yeah.
OK, listen: if you haven't seen Dr. Horrible all the way though, DON'T WATCH THE FOLLOWING. It's all about what makes the emotional impact of the ending work (for me, anyway). In simple language: Hello, spoiler! If you know it's coming it won't work on you. So go watch the whole thing, come back, and .... well, that's more effort than this tiny clip deserves.
And if you do plan to watch it ... check your volume level now. Ready? Good.
Okay, someone expressed an interest, and because I need very little encouragement:
I only captured every other frame in the interest of time and file size, so it's 'on twos' as the jargon would have it. I don't think too much is lost in the translation... My second-year animation teacher taught us that acting flows outward from the brain, so things closest to the brain respond first to a change of thought and it sort of ripples out from there. Eyes usually go first, then eyebrows and mouth, then head, etc. It's neat to see it in action:
Oddly enough, it was only in doing this that I noticed that's where Penny is standing. There are still things to discover, even now!
So, now that I've thrown away what credibility I might have had, and exhausted my ideas for gag sketches, I've pretty much run out of ways to express fangirlish enthusiasm. Alas. I'll have to do something actually useful now...
By 'colossal' I mean some doodles, two drawings, and the world's shortest music video. It's not about quantity, though, people ... it's concentration. Sheer density. Tread with caution, you may encounter instability.
A little preamble (assuming you are actually reading this and not skipping straight to the images). I am an animator. I have always found my interest to lie more with acting and expression rather than action, which showed in my work at school, so I have spent years trying to get comfortable with moving characters around, to make up for my weakness in that area. I realized, upon starting at Disney, that in doing so I'd neglected actually learning anything at all about acting, and the gaping holes in that discipline were harder to fill in because it's so subjective.
Then, lo, what should appear in the land of the Internets but some very animated videos featuring a stage actor! Stage actors and animators both have to study caricature of movement and expression to transcend the limits of their medium (animators have simplified line drawings or virtual sculptures to work with, stage actors have to communicate across a vast distance). I've always heard one should study from live action, not animation, but most film actors are so subtle and naturalistic that you can't see what they're doing frame by frame, and I'm bad enough at caricature as it is, it seems counterproductive to make it that much harder. It'd be much easier to study what stage actors do, only ... they're on stage, and you can't stop-frame them. So here's a thing where not only does the camera linger within ten feet of a talented stage actor, but the production allows for caricatured stagey acting, and it's available in a format that makes frame advance and retreat an absolute breeze. You just pause it and use the arrow keys to move forwards and back – this works in Quicktime as well as iTunes. There's some really great material in there (I might be persuaded to post my favourite scene to stop-frame if anyone is interested in it but me) and I've spent more time this week poring over walks and expression changes than I'd like to admit.
Dr Horrible's climactic song has an especially high concentration of great cartoony expressions, so I focused on that for drawing from the screen, with the aim of both improving my expression vocabulary and figuring out Neil Patrick Harris' odd facial structure (and how expressions manifest themselves on it). It was ... really hard. Which is probably a good thing. The biggest challenge was pushing the expression so it was as strong as the one on film (ideally it'd be stronger, but I'm not there yet) and make it still look like him.
Here are a few of the more successful attempts:
At some point I realized I had seen this facial structure before, in a way ...
Right. So. All this work establishing a caricature/design to use is kind of a pointless reflex, in this case, because all the best moments have already been done, and done way better than I could do. All that's left are stupid gags. Oh well, I've learned stuff ... that's important, right?
I ... this ... yeah.
OK, listen: if you haven't seen Dr. Horrible all the way though, DON'T WATCH THE FOLLOWING. It's all about what makes the emotional impact of the ending work (for me, anyway). In simple language: Hello, spoiler! If you know it's coming it won't work on you. So go watch the whole thing, come back, and .... well, that's more effort than this tiny clip deserves.
And if you do plan to watch it ... check your volume level now. Ready? Good.
Okay, someone expressed an interest, and because I need very little encouragement:
I only captured every other frame in the interest of time and file size, so it's 'on twos' as the jargon would have it. I don't think too much is lost in the translation... My second-year animation teacher taught us that acting flows outward from the brain, so things closest to the brain respond first to a change of thought and it sort of ripples out from there. Eyes usually go first, then eyebrows and mouth, then head, etc. It's neat to see it in action:
Oddly enough, it was only in doing this that I noticed that's where Penny is standing. There are still things to discover, even now!
So, now that I've thrown away what credibility I might have had, and exhausted my ideas for gag sketches, I've pretty much run out of ways to express fangirlish enthusiasm. Alas. I'll have to do something actually useful now...
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This is relevant to my interests. And, you absolutely cannot post a long paragraph bragging about a pretty clip you found and then proceed to NOT POST IT. Jerk. :|
I love Mignola's Hellboy style. Your Dr. Horrible on the top, second from the left, has nearly identical facial structure to this Hellboy. (http://comicsmedia.ign.com/comics/image/article/765/765210/interview-hellboys-mike-mignola-20070215024537271.jpg) It also happens to be my favourite Horrible on the page. :)
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I refrained from posting the clip because, for one, I'd have to construct it all in Flash, and Flash had driven me adequately crazy with its useless help files when I tried making the clip above (seriously, how hard is it to write 'To make a button actually do something, follow these steps...') that I didn't want to dive back in that pool again. Also I've lived the last seven years with the reaction 'What the ... just ... shut up about [most recent obsession] already!' so I'm trying to learn restraint... but this is the internet! We're all mad here! I might cobble something together. If you're curious and want to see now, it's the scene where he says 'Maybe the fee's too pricey for them to realize...' Fantastic expression changes there.
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Also, eye shape. Always changing! Squinty but not squinty! Flat top or arched? What the crap?
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I tend to work around problematic faces by also drawing other people on the same show; sometimes comparing faces makes it easier to put my finger on an actor's facial idiosynchracies... although I generally do it for the strapping heroes, because they all have similar features and it's hard not to make them all look like generic leading men...
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And you have also addressed exactly why there are no strapping heroes in my sketchbook. (Well, among other reasons, but that's the predominant one.) That said, not only does Nathan Fillion have an unexpectedly odd face for a leading man, but he is magically capable of pushing his face into a caricature of itself, which will make the process that much easier.
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Dr. Horrible believes in the environment, eh?
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it's glorious is the thing.
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But I'm glad you don't . :)
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No no no no no no no.
If for no other reason than that the acting could never ever be as fabulous as what Neil Patrick Harris gives the camera. And really ... without that ... it's just silly.
Not that silly is bad, but ... it has its place, y'know? And when you take out everything but the silly in Dr Horrible you have The Tick,* which is a great cartoon, but it's already been done. (Not that animation isn't full of copycats, but who would want Dr Horrible to be second best?)
Ramble, ramble, ramble. Nice icon, btw. :D Glad you liked the 'Wait ... what?' – I finessed the expression on that one probably more than was mentally sound. Still not quite there but I think I'll have to get better as an artist before I can adequately fix it.
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This is fantastic!!!
(Anonymous) 2008-08-16 07:31 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2008-08-19 03:58 am (UTC)(link)no subject
Maybe.
Darnit, now that I know someone's waiting for it ... I have no excuse not to.
8D