I’m Not That Girl – Acting Shot Reflection

 

 

When I started this project, I knew immediately that I wanted to use an audio clip from one of my absolute favourite musicals, Wicked, and I decided to go for my favourite song “I’m Not That Girl”. This decision had quite the knock on effect for how I wanted to approach this project, as the song was performed by Idina Menzel, the voice actor and singer behind Disney’s Elsa. I knew there was an Elsa rig available which would make for the perfect combination for the acting shot.

When considering who I wanted to aim my demo reel at, I looked primarily at Blue Zoo, a company who’s work I greatly admire. For this specific audio clip, however, I wanted to stray from something overly cartoony to lean a bit more into realism, so I began looking at other companies such as Humain who have a good balance between the two.

When it came to choosing a style to animate with, I looked primarily at Disney, particularly Frozen, as not only was I using a rig based off of one of their characters, but their animators already had the pleasure of animating to Idina Menzel’s singing. I definitly didn’t even come close to replicating a Disney animation, but it was a fun challenge. I also looked towards the work of Dreamworks animators in How To Train Your Dragon which uses a similar animation style of pushed realism.

In both these examples, the characters move with a lot more subtle motion and detail, and while they are certainly pushed, they maintain a reasonable level of realism, tending to stray away from the more cartoony styles of studios such as illumination.

When it came to finding reference, it was hard to find something suitable for the action, so instead I chose to act it out myself. It took a lot longer and I probably could have saved a lot of time by setting up a makeshift tripod to record myself using my phone, but I enjoyed the process all the same. I also looked at footage of Idina Menzel and Julia Murney peforming the song to get a better idea of the kind of acting choices I could use and the facial expressions, particularly how their mouths worked when singing the song.

I certainly don’t think I came close to doing Idina Menzel justice, or the Elsa rig itself for that matter. I think the arms are still quite floaty and could have used a lot more polish, the animation on the hands is quite minimal and while I don’t think the lip sync is off, it doesn’t do justice to the song itself. The pose choices throughout the animation are, in retrospect, not great either. There isn’t much visual clarity, especially with the placement of the camera, and you miss a lot of the mouth movement when the head is tilted down. I would have liked to add more detail to the eyes and eyebrows during the animation as well, and perhaps added some secondary action with the hair.

Overall I’m happy with how it turned out, but I think I’ll be revisiting this clip over the summer to reanimate it with these notes in mind.

 

Below I’ve linked some of the clips I looked at, as well as tutorials that helped with the process.