Identical Twins

 So, I've been reading "Animated Performance, bringing imaginary, animal, human and fantasy characters to life" by Nancy Beiman. This is a first run through on an exercise called Identical twins. The story is that these are two children fighting over a toy and the objective is to establish personality through timing. I don't feel as though I've succeeded yet, but this is just my first try, trying to hit the main poses and solve staging problems. One thing I didn't foresee and solved on the animation table was how the second twin would actually take the "toy" away from the other. One major staging problem was when the twin on the left lunges for the toy, he comes too close and it kind of ruins the effect of when he reaches out and grabs the twin on the right.

 In the next run through I plan on fixing these problems and adding onto the established action... I'm going for personality. In my opinion the clay ball is the stop-motion equivalent of the 2d flour sac. The challenge of making an inanimate object with limited means of communication come alive is still the same.

 Here are some notes I took while reading the book...

• You can switch between characters, letting each lead the action in turn by putting them in the focal point of the frame
• Secondary character should delay a bit before taking over the action to indicate a thought process
• Don't switch between characters too quickly.
• The lead character will not always be at the center of interest, 
• but they will be at the focal point of the scene with no distractions from background elements. 
• The center of interest will shift back and forth between the lead and secondary character based on who is delivering the story point.
•  Secondary characters should sperform subtle actions like blink or tilt their head while the lead is taking over the action so that they don't 'die'. This is called a moving hold.

That's all for today, more to come soon hopefully :)