Brian Cox at djcad

The Dundee University, to which djcad is attached, is very fortunate to have the esteemed actor Brian Cox as its Rector. He was kind enough to come to the college to talk to the animation students about film-making and acting. Here is a snippet from his lecture in which he talks about his acting process and the importance of motivation within a character.

The talk was full of great information as you'd expect from an actor who has worked with the likes of Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Woody Allen, Paul Greengrass and Spike Jonze. Many thanks to Brian and we hope to see him again soon.

More Subtext ... and Top Gun

After my recent subtext post I came across a couple of humorous references to subtext which I though I'd share and talk about to hopefully help clarify what it is and how it applies to acting for anyone still unsure.

The first clip is from The Trip, a recent BBC comedy series in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play lose versions of themselves. It's a largely improvised sitcom which follows them on a tour of expensive restaurants in the North of England. The two performers are both actors and impressionists and my favourite parts of the programme are thier impressions and analysis of famous actors their varying techniques. At the end of the following clip Steve Coogan points out an acting technique used by Richard Gere.





"Richard Gere does a very interesting technique he does in a lot of his films, not a lot of people pick him up on it. What he does is he'll listen to what someone says and then he'll smile enigmatically. He'll look away into the middle distance as if remembering something from the past, laugh about it and then return to the dialogue."

He then acts this out -


Looking away, smiling enigmatically ...


... then returning to the dialogue.

He also embellishes this further by adding a head shake and a shrug.

"See? The little look. They thought, ooh, there's a little story, a little subtext there we didn't know about. What's going on there? Why did he look over there? What was that memory?"

Although this is a caricature, it's interesting to study and makes it clear how actors use subtext. It is important to note that the action - the look away and smile before the dialogue is not the subtext, but this implies a subtext. Often the subtext of the dialogue is clear but in this instance the subtext is left purposely unclear. This creates a sense of mystery about the character, we feel like he's not letting on what he's thinking, this potentially will tantalise and engage the audience and want them to find out more about the character.

By the way does anyone know of a scene in a film where Richard Gere does this? I would love to find an example.

This next example is a sound file from a comedy show called The Stand by the British comedian Daniel Kitson, here he talks about the lack of subtext in the film Top Gun (caution swearing!).



"My favourite films of that ilk though really is Top Gun and I'll tell you why .... The reason Top Gun's a great film is because the character in Top Gun who's a bit of a loose cannon, who plays by his own rules, who's a law unto himself, he's actually called Maverick. And his enemy who's a bit cold, a bit stand off-ish, not quite human, he's called called Iceman. There's actually a scene where Iceman says to Maverick "I don't like you because you're dangerous", and Maverick goes "Yeah, that's right, I am dangerous". It's almost like the writers decided to make a whole film without any subtext whatsoever."

This is again an exaggeration of what happens in the film but he makes an interesting point to have your characters named after their personality type - 'Maverick' and 'Iceman' and also having them say exactly what they think with no attempt at subtext would make a rather obvious and uninteresting scene.

So after listening to this I decided to try and find the scene on youtube. What I discovered is what the Top Gun script appears to lack in subtext the actors have made up for with their performance. Although I don't think it's the greatest acting, Tom Cruise's delivery of "That's right, Ice Man, I am Dangerous" has a clear subtext.



Tom Cruise snaps into anger at the start of the line, then stops, smiles and pretends to brush down Iceman's uniform - a friendly and familiar gesture. It's open to interpretation but this is how I read the subtext - The initial snap into anger is false, he's testing Iceman, trying to scare him, like jumping out and someone and shouting "Boo!". Then the subtext of the rest of the line is "I'm not going to let you get to me" and again it's interesting to note that the acting choices have little to do with the text - "That's right, Ice Man, I am Dangerous".


Anger at the start of the line ...


... then he stops, smiles and pretends to brush down Iceman's uniform.

Clearly in this scene the two characters are sizing each other up and testing each other's nerve, it's interesting to see that after this line Val Kilmer bites at Maverick - another pretend attack done in the hope of making him flinch. However, the later part of Maverick's line combines the two differing ideas of argumentative and provocative words said in a restrained and disarming way. This definitely shows that Maverick is not going to shy away from confrontation but also that he will not be so easily provoked. This makes the performance more engaging and Maverick a deeper and more interesting character than if he had just snapped and shouted the line at Iceman.

Dapoon's Subtext Question

An animator called Dapoon asked me a question about subtext in animation on this post from a while ago. As my rambling answer expanded beyond the limitations of the comment box I decided to put it here.

Thanks for the question; it took me a while to get to grips with what subtext is to. Subtext is not adding extra actions to your animation but exploring the underlying meaning of spoken words and actions in the hope of creating a deeper performance.

We should always strive to seek and animate the subtext of what the character says and this can be in varying degrees of alignment to what the spoken words are. Sarcasm would be an extreme example; at this point the meaning of what the character is saying is the exact opposite of the words they're speaking. "It's cold in here" = "It's hot in here".

I like this Monty Python sketch where they play around with this subtext. The Drill Sergeant's obviously sarcastic tone and manner belies the fact he seems to be talking totally literally.



You could play this scene with the same text spoken with a literal tone and it would still make sense ... probably wouldn't be very funny though. The humour comes from our perception of what the Sergeant is asking, or not asking - the subtext.

Dapoon suggests a situation - A mother folding sheets, while she asks her son how his day at school was. Let's explore that.

For me an interesting area of subtext to explore would be in the mother's delivery. Let's say her words are simply "How was your day at school?"

She could be just asking in a way that suggests she always asks this and is not really interested, it's almost just a greeting, like a "Hello" in this instance the subtext is there but subtle. Where the subtext becomes more obvious is when she's asking with a hidden agenda to find out more about his day. She could say the same words but be asking -

"Did you get into trouble today?"
"How did you do in the test you had?"
"Did you speak to that girl you like?"

Or if she'd already had a call from the headmaster to tell her that the boy has misbehaved this could form the subtext of the delivery, it could be a rhetorical "How was your day at school?" = "I know what you've done at school"

As you can see the delivery and acting of these lines would be different but the words or text ("How was your day at school?") stay the same.

The folding of the sheets I would call a 'secondary action', this would be both separate from the performance but also linked to it, if she was annoyed at her son she would be folding differently from if she was just absently mindedly doing it while chatting to him.

Hope that helps!

The Name's Digger ...

As some clips from the film Legend of the Guardians have been released I thought it might be interesting to choose one that I worked on and explain the style of the animation, how I approached my shots and the techniques I adopted for the process.

The scene I’ve chosen is the introduction of the character Digger.



This scene has a simple structure. The characters Soren and Digger meet, they argue, Gylfie intervenes and the aggressor, Digger (who's driving the scene) reaches a turning point where he changes his mind about our main characters and agrees to help. Conflict is the essence of drama and all stories requires drama to entertain the viewer and to succeed. It makes the animator's job easier if the conflict driving the scene is obvious to them.

This scene was lead by James Cunliffe and animated by his team which composed of Andrew Hunt, Jerome Dernoncourt, Thomas Price, Tim Rowlandson, and myself. It was animated early in production - it was my third sequence, but for Jerome, Thomas and Andrew, who had just arrived on the project, it was their first scene. I'm sure it was a little daunting for them to be given such an important character piece straight away. I remember Andrew's frustration as he was allocated a significant shot in the middle of the sequence which he was trying to animate whilst also getting to grips with the project's software and tools. However Andrew's talent prevailed and he achieved what was required, producing one of my favourite shots of the film.


Andrew's shot, much longer in the film than in the youtube version above.

Coincidentally this scene was not only the introduction to the character Digger, but it was the first shots of him to be animated. We were therefore given the responsibility of defining his character and laying down the foundations of how he would be animated throughout the film.



There was some interesting physicality to the scene and it was a good opportunity for us to explore how the owls would move. The brief was to keep them as naturalistic as possible in their movements, but we still had to use these movements to convey the character's motivations and feelings.


Digger is a burrowing owl and therefore written into the scene were a couple of examples of a burrowing owl’s behaviour which needed to be animated. Firstly, as a burrowing owl he lives in a hole in the ground there was a point in the scene where he had to dig and spray dirt onto Soren. Secondly, prior to this there was a pose he had to adopt, which is based on genuine owl behaviour, where he brought his wings out to his side and tilted them forward - this is a stance adopted by owls who feel threatened to make themselves appear larger and therefore more intimidating to a would-be attacker.





Beyond these two scripted behaviours myself and the rest of the team wanted to bring as much of a burrowing owl's timing, poses and attitude to the character as possible. For example, burrowing owls naturally have a very staccato way of moving, a type of movement which fitted Digger's eccentric personality. Actor David Wenham, who provided the voice, had already done a great job of adding this to his performance.


Some footage of a characterful burrowing owl.

I was given the first two shots in the sequence where Digger emerges from his hole and says the line. "Ow, nice hunting. Catching a moth that's already been caught."



I had to animate both characters in the two shots. I thought it might be interesting to contrast the two owl's actions against one another, by keeping Soren as naturalistic as possible while making Digger's performance broader in range and more cartoony. In the start of the first shot we saw Soren catching a moth in his talons (unfortunately mostly missed by the movie's fade-in from black) so I researched this action thoroughly. By observing this action of owls it was interesting to see the way they keep their wings back during the attack, their talons come forward from under their chin and how they reach out in front of their face.



I looked at a lot of footage of owls pouncing and the final animation was an amalgamation of many of them, but these are three that I found particularly useful. The first two are barn owls, the last is a hawk owl


Soren with flipped image from reference footage.



Here is some footage I used for Soren's reaction to Digger jumping out the hole and saying "Hey". Although I feel a little sorry for these owls being chased around by their keeper, I really liked their faltering steps and the a-symmetrical pose of the wings. This sort of action seemed to suit Soren at this point- his surprise had made his actions appear primal and naturalistic.


Flipped image from footage.


Soren in similar pose.

I then filmed some reference shots of myself acting out Digger's line, I’m not purporting to be an actor but I do find this process useful. Like I've set out before in my post 'Capturing Honesty', I try not to plan too much, I just try to gauge the personality of the character involved as much as possible and concentrate on the emotions of the shot. I knew Digger would be moving forward towards Soren but I tried not to focus on this. Also the acting room was too small to walk the distance I needed, so I knew I'd have to add more steps to the performance during animation.



I apologise for the quality and the sound of the movie, this is because I filmed it at 3/4 speed then sped it back up to the right frame rate afterwards. This is a tip I picked up from James Cunliffe. The extra time enables you to relax and not rush your performance, it also helped to make my movement sharper, something that would suit Digger’s character.

I decided upon a combination of two takes. I liked these because my attitude felt about right for the moment and my body action seemed to match the rhythm dialogue - something I decided to exaggerate during animation. I also liked the expression at the end. It changes briefly from anger and annoyance to something close to hurt and fear. I liked this as it shows a chink in Digger's armour. Digger is in fact not a real threat, and is unlikely to attack Soren. His aggressive reaction to Soren is nothing more than bravado, although we don't know Digger yet, Digger is harmless and he is simply upset at the loss of 'his' moth. The expression just flashes briefly across Digger's face, making it less obvious - an emotion he was trying to hide.


Expression I tried to recreate from reference.

This sequence was the first one in which I used this way of working - looking through bird footage for actions I could use, then filming myself performing the line and then marrying the two together to create a mixture of a character and naturalistic performance. Therefore this scene also helped me find and define my way of working as this became an approach I adopted throughout the rest of the film.


Digger out of sight. Shot animated by Tim Rowlandson.

I also animated a Gylfie shot later in the sequence, this was a little more straight forward. However, in the storyboards and animatic of the sequence Digger's back was still visible as he hid in his hole, but we decided that it would be funnier and easier to have him completely hidden from view. The animation director, Eric Leighton, then had the idea that Digger should not just be idle in the hole but moving around, doing something odd, out of sight of the audience. This would therefore have to be conveyed through the reactions of Soren and Gylfie as they peered into the hole.


My shot showing a confused Gylfie.

My first take of Gylfie was more straight forward, Gylfie just earnestly delivering her line - "We didn't mean to take your moth". But after Eric suggested the idea in relation to Digger, I added to the shot her looking around and expressing confusion.

As with almost all my animation, time and distance from it and hindsight mean that I now look back on these first few shots and wish I had done a few things differently.

I started the sequence before some of the other animators, and had a block of my shots approved quickly. I later saw how Andrew and James had animated the character of Digger - making his movements snappier and adding more secondary expressions. This, I feel, was more successful than mine and would have liked to have gone back into my first shot and amended it. Unfortunately, however there wasn't enough time to do this.


Images from James' shot (left) and Andrew's (right).

And although I still quite like the feel of Gylfie's shot, I feel the idea of her following Digger in the hole was not as clear as it could have been.


However, the animation director commented positively on my performance of Soren in the first shot and showed it to many animators as an example of his movement to follow, so perhaps I helped define some of the film's style there.

I still like the scene overall and I'm very glad I was able to work on it. It was fun to make and was carried out during an exciting point in production where deadlines were a little more forgiving and there was much to discover - from the characters and their movements to the resources and animation tools, as well as ways of working with them.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I would like to thank all those who have read, passed on and mentioned my flight tutorial on their website, I've been blown away by the reaction to it. And welcome to the new followers of this blog, I will endeavour to make my posts as interesting as possible!

Acting, Breathing and Al Pacino

Breathing is not something we are often conscious of, therefore animating a character breathing during dialogue is easily overlooked. Spending the time studying and adding this to your shot can really create a great sense of believability to your work. In fact, as we'll discover, breathing is something that can be used to drive a performance.

We first should take some time to understand how breathing works and what controls it.



Breathing, as I'm sure you're aware, is the expanding and shrinking of the lungs. This is primarily driven by the diaphragm which contracts, moving down and pulling air into your lungs, then during the exhale the diaphragm relaxes, moving up and expelling the air from our lungs. However, this is not the only force acting on the lungs. There are muscles around the ribs which contract, expanding the rib cage by swinging the ribs up, then on the exhale they expand and the ribs swing down causing the rib cage to get smaller.



I've used a 3d animation package to create a graph which represents how lung volume changes during a typical breath taken when at rest. The air fills quickly at first then slows as it reaches the apex, on the exhale, the air leaves the lungs quickly at first then slows as the lung volume reaches it's lowest point.



However when we speak, our breathing pattern is very different. The air is inhaled as before but is then compressed, the muscles around the ribs and the diaphragm working against each other to condense the air in our lungs to create a positive pressure there. The air is then steadily released as the the dialogue is spoken, then after the line of dialogue is finished, the diaphragm is relaxed. This causes the last of the air to empty quickly from the lungs, then we start to breathe in and the process can begin again.



Of course this is not a one way process, dialogue also affects the lung volume - if the dialogue has a particularly loud accent in it, that will affect the lung volume by creating a sudden drop. I've represented this above in my lung volume graph by showing a drop in the curve. As well as loud accents, often 'w' sounds use greater amounts of air and will also cause the above to happen.

Now we have looked at this in abstract, let's look at an example. I've selected a clip of Al Pacino from the start of the teaser trailer for Ocean's 13. Al Pacino's breathing is often quite apparent in his performances. I suspect this is because he was originally a stage actor and has learned how to use and exaggerate his breathing to help to project his voice. But in this case, I believe he's using it primarily to drive tension into his voice.

Ocean's 13 teaser trailer can be found here

transcript -
"I know people, highly invested in my survival and they are people who really know how to hurt in ways you can't even imagine."

First, let's talk about the performance in general. Al Pacino's character Willy Banks, is a powerful and ruthless casino owner and he has just learned of Danny Ocean's plans to disrupt his business. In this shot, he warns him that there would be violent consequences if Ocean carries out these plans.


"You're joking?"

Al's character is incensed at the idea that anyone would set out to damage his business, although the conversation is conducted in public, he doesn't want to draw attention to himself. He's also very clever and doesn't want to reveal that he is affected by this. Al Pacino's performance is very restrained, but it's charged with an intensity which leaves us in no doubt that he is deeply enraged. He keeps his face predominately impartial, at only one point does he let the anger he's feeling creep briefly onto his face - just before he says "really know how to hurt". This is known as a 'microexpression', to do this voluntarily, really shows Al Pacino's acting genius, they naturally occur when someone is trying to conceal or repress an emotion. This one flashes across his face, it is literally only there for one frame, hard to spot when the clip is played at full speed but we read it subconsciously.


Microexpression - incandescent rage

There is a wonderfully subtle texture as well as a change in tempo and tone through the piece. During the first line "I know people" his body is ever so slightly loose and there is a hint of a smile that says "you're joking, aren't you?". Then, as he says "highly invested in my survival...", his body tenses, the speed of his delivery increases and we get that glimpse of anger he's feeling, then at "you can't even imagine" his eyes widen and his speech slows down again to intimidate his opponent by suggesting that he could do something crazy.


"I could do something crazy"

Al Pacino's phonemes, like his performance, have been kept small but he's using his breathing to generate as much tension in his voice as possible as well as project what would otherwise be just a whisper. He's forcing as much air as he can through the narrow exit of his voice box. If you watch his throat you can see it tense as he speaks, then relax as he releases the pressure to breathe in.

Analysis of Al Pacino's Breathing from Brendan Body on Vimeo.

Here I've animated a representation of his lung volume on the right hand side of the screen. If you would like to step though this video and/or view it at larger size I have placed a quicktime version here

What's interesting is how almost all his movement is initiated or affected by his breathing. You can see his body tensing as he compresses the air before each line of dialogue, then you see his body relax slightly as he inhales. This causes his body to rock backwards a couple of times during this scene. There is only one small body and head movement during "even" that appears to be separate from his breathing.




Here is the animation curve of the bar in the movie above. We can see how the breathing pattern we cited above appears throughout the performance, note the way it varies too. We can also see how the rhythm of his breathing echos the intensity in the performance - at the start during "I know people" his breath is slower, drawing out the exhale in his 'almost laugh', but as his delivery gets more vehement during "highly invested in my survival ... who really know how to hurt" his breathing gets faster, shorter and we find small half-breaths. Then during that intimidating last line, we can see how he slows down again.

So, how can we use this? Well, if you were trying to create a subtle performance and wanted to keep the character still, but not so much that the character 'dies', and obviously we don't want the character just floating around randomly, we could base the character's movements around the breathing and can be sure it will work and add to the performance. Also, if you wanted to create an intensity in your performance you could exaggerate the breathing and seek to show the the tension in the body as the character compresses and holds the air in their lungs as they speak.

Thanks to James Cunliffe who helped me put this post together.

Some Thoughts On Acting Part 2 (capturing honesty)

Finally, here's part 2. This is about honesty in acting, and is primarily a method to employ while filming yourself for animation reference and includes an example of my work and some embarrassing clips of myself. Enjoy.

When working on The Tale of Despereaux, we were encouraged to act our shots out and then to show this reference to the director, Sam Fell, before starting to animate.

As context is important in the following example, I should give you some back story. A rat called Rosscurro has convinced a servant girl, Mig, to abduct a princess named Pea. Roscurro, through a series of events has turned from a hero to a bitter villain, hell bent on punishing someone, specifically the princess, for the ill-treatment he has received. He has told the naive Mig, that if she abducts Pea and locks her in the dungeon, she can become the princess in her place, when in fact this is untrue and he intends to trap both of them in the dungeon.



In this sequence the three characters are walking through the cavernous and deserted dungeons, Rosscurro is on Mig's shoulder and talking into her ear. The terrified Princess, who is bound up and held at knife point by Mig is screaming, and in this shot Roscurro says to Mig, who repeats everything he tells her, "Tell her it's no use, no one can hear her".



Here's one of my first takes, I decided at the start of the shot I would look toward Mig, and that for "tell her it's no use" I would try a dismissive gesture, then look toward the princess for "no one can hear her" while giving a fierce point.

take1

There are many things I didn't like about this performance. Firstly, I'd given myself too much to do in the time I had (a common animation mistake), and I was struggling to fit in both the dismissive gesture and the point. Also, pointing is one of those animation clichés that it's best to try and avoid. This performance was very 'on-the-nose', so I decided to try a different approach.

Shooting this was still a valuable experience, as I could see straight away that those ideas were not going to work well. To animate the performance and discover that, would've taken days, here I was able to see very quickly that this was not as strong as I thought it would be.

take2

This is footage from another take, this time I decided I wouldn't try to plan what I was going to do, I would just switch the camera on try and put myself in the mind frame of the character and see what happened. I also decided to concentrate on the subtext of the dialogue which was "so what, nobody cares" .

When I shot this I thought that I wasn't really doing anything and so this would be uninteresting and unusable, but when I looked back over the footage I was surprised to see I had been doing more than I thought and the performance seemed to work better than the last take. First of all, the action was much simpler - no hand gestures or excess information, but it was stronger for it, my body posture at the end was simple and clear, and seemed to be conveying what the shot was about, bitterness and disinterest. I had turned away from who I was speaking to, this is something I probably wouldn't of planned, it's customary to have your character look to whom they're talking to for clarity, and usually if a character is angry, you'd think that they would stare at the source of their anger. But in this shot, even though he was angry, he wasn't incandescent with rage toward the princess, in fact he was detached and uncaring about her, and her cries for help. Therefore, since he didn't care about either who he was talking to, or about, it made sense that he looked away and clarity wasn't a problem as there was no one else around, a point he was making in the dialogue. I subconsciously, did a little shrug during, "no one can hear her", it was subtle but was something that I could exaggerate in animation. There was also an eye shift around "hear", another thing I did subconsciously but which also made sense for the shot. My facial expression seemed to fit better as well instead of just anger, I had a more specific, surly sneer.

Here is my first, stepped key, block of the shot -

Roscuro Block from Brendan Body on Vimeo.

And here is the finished animation, rendered simply -

Roscuro Final Animation from Brendan Body on Vimeo.

As you can see, apart from the adding of the vertical motion of Mig as she walks along, the shot hardly had any major revisions as it went through animation. I copied my performance, while exaggerating certain things, like the shoulder shrug as well as attitude in body posture. It was one of the most straight forward shots for me to complete on Despereaux, and although far from perfect, I believe it's one of my most successful. Sam Fell actually commented how strong the attitude was in it, which was very satisfying.

If you've ever tried to film yourself for an animation you're planning, and have had preconceived ideas about what you'd like the character to do, you quickly discover how hard acting is, to keep your mind on giving a performance while also concentrating on what your body is doing is extremely tough. I have a great respect for people who can get their bodies and face to do precisely what they want when acting out reference. Jeff Gabor is a great example, his Horton Hears a Who comparison reel is incredible, his ability to act what he wants to animate is very impressive. However, I find this method, even when done well, can lead to the result feeling unnaturally acted, rather than something more honest. Much better, I think to ignore what your body is doing, try and feel what the character is feeling, concentrate on the subtext, and see what happens.

Working on Guardians of Ga'Hoole I'm using this approach a lot, and my lead, James Cunliffe is showing me further techniques, like shooting with the dialogue slowed down or doing a couple of passes, the first one this, sub-conscious, 'honesty' pass then, shooting more reference this time concentrating on the physicality of the performance. Then you can use both to make a very strong piece of animation ... but more about this another time.

Some Thoughts on Acting Part 1 (subtext)

I was recently asked by Chetan, a young animator, about acting in animation so I thought I'd post my thoughts here. This was supposed to be just one post but it's got rather large so I've had to break it down into two. This first one is on subtext in dialogue.

I was introduced to this term while working on The Tale of Despereaux. Put simply, subtext is the underlying meaning of what someone is saying, not what the words actually are. What we interpret as viewers is ALWAYS the subtext and not the text. An example would be the word 'OK', it can mean many things based on context and the way it's delivered.

Text = "OK"

POSSIBLE SUBTEXT =

1. "I'm OK"
2. "I'm OK?"
3. "Are you OK?"
4. "stop Hassling me"
5. "I really don't want to do this but OK - I will do it for you"
6. "I am resolute"
7. "I am pumped let's go!"
8. "I've finished"
9. "I understand you"
etc….

Here's a piece of dialogue from the film Joe Versus the Volcano, Joe's boss is on the phone so we only hear one side of the conversation -


Joe Versus The Volcano

here's the transcript -
"I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? Harry. Yeah, Harry. But can he do the job? I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you' Harry! Harry, Harry. Yeah, Harry, but can he do the job? I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? I'm not arguing that with you. Harry, I am not arguing that with you! Who said that? I didn't say that. If I said that, I would have been wrong. Maybe. Maybe. I'm not arguing that with you! Yeah, Harry, I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? I'm not arguing that with you! I am not arguing that with you! I am not arguing that with you! Who told you that? No! I told you that! Me! What? Maybe. Maybe, maybe. Maybe!"

The character basically repeats the same three or four things, yet it sounds like a real conversation doesn't? How can someone have a conversation when all they say is the same couple of sentences over and over again? Because of the subtext, what the character means is not what he's saying, take the phrase "I'm not arguing that with you", at various points in the conversation it means different things -

Text = "I'm not arguing that with you"

SUBTEXT =

"That's beside the point"
"Stop repeating yourself"
"Listen to me"
"Please answer the question"
"I don't want to talk about this anymore"


Although, this is obviously open to interpretation, there is no doubt that it feels like he is trying to move the conversation forward by changing the subtext of what he is saying. The writer played around with this idea, and there are many scenes in the film where the characters would repeat the same line with different sub textual meaning.

Some Like It Hot is a famously good script and it is riddled with conversations with no textual meaning but with layers of great sub textual content. Here's a clip -



Watch at around 2.05.

Here's the text from part of the conversation between Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis' characters -

"So who are you?"
"Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"
"not very likely"
"You staying at the hotel?"
"Not at all"
"Your face is familiar"

The characters words aren't saying much but there is definitely a lot going on in these word. The first layer of subtext is that she is trying to talk to him and he is acting aloof. But under the surface, there is a further layer, as we also know that he is pretending to act this way as he knows exactly who she is and what he has to do to attract her.

On one level his subtext is -

"go away, leave me alone"

But underneath this he is really saying

"I'm intriguing, I'm famous and handsome, talk to me."

Very clever stuff. The reason this scene is so entertaining is because of the subtext, which is clear in the body language and delivery of the dialogue, and that's what we the audience read, not the spoken words.

So how does this effect animation? Well this is a very important, we should ALWAYS strive to seek and animate the subtext, and the subtext should ALWAYS be different to the text. This is so important that for non dialogue shots, Randy Cook would record the unspoken dialogue (subtext) of a shot for his animators to animate to in their scenes.

Here's an hypothetical scene - A girl appears from a fitting room and shows a new dress she's wearing to her boyfriend, she asks his opinion, he says "yeah, it's great".

If we have his body language mimicking that thought, (it's great) the animation could be fantastic, but the idea isn't very interesting. It's what we call on-the-nose acting, and is just that, acting the words without any deeper thought as to their meaning or what the character is thinking. If the boyfriend says "yeah, it's great", yet his body language says "I'm bored, can we go home now?" we'll have gotten inside the character and given him some depth and therefore created something much more interesting and entertaining.