And The Audio Clip Will Be...

Our current multi-week assignment is to animate Bishop doing a line of dialog of our choice from any tv show or movie. Sunday we turned in our 3 or 4 selects so our mentors could help us decide which of them would be best suited for this assignment. The goal was to find a line that has interesting variety of inflection, pauses in the delivery or a change of mood; something that would inspire us when we get into animating the shot. I don't have that many DVDs, but I was able to find some decent clips:

1. Mayor Vaughn, speaking to Chief Brody from Jaws
2. Hooper frustrated with Vaughn, also from Jaws
3. Chandler, worried he's being too picky about dates from Friends
4. Laura speaking to Rob from The Dick Van Dyke Show

Here is an mp3 of all 3 (319k).

I like the subtlety of clip 1, the intensity of 2 and the delivery of 4 makes it my 2nd favorite. But my mentor and many of my AnimationMentor classmates seemed to prefer the clip from Friends, and I agree it is the best of the group, and it will be fun to animate.

My next few tasks will be to break down the dialog into main beats or phrases, figure out operative words which are like accents of the line, and do some sketches to develop ideas for important poses. I'm hoping to borrow a video camera from someone to shoot some reference of myself acting out the shot, too. I might have to just plock down some moo* and buy a MiniDV camera soon. Gotta work fast because after all that I'll have to figure out the frames that each part of the dialog falls on and do a quick blocking pass to turn in Sunday. This is a fun assignment and I think all of us are sooper excited about it!
*moo - kenism, short for moola.