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Anatomy of a Dog Dog anatomy details the various structures of canines (e.g. muscle, organ and skeletal anatomy). The detailing of these structures changes based on dog breed due to the huge variation of size in dog breeds. Would you be surprised to know that Continue Reading →

Everyone is being pretty enthusiastic about Bev's idea! I will refrain from posting her synopsis and story board twice within our individual blogs, but please refer to it here. Despite being a good idea and a great starting point I also think 'Mime' is a great art form in itself and should be quite a challenge to animate. 'Dynamic' is the word I think.. There's notably a great level of precision in mime and it seems really uniform with balance and rhythm. I personally think good referencing and life drawing should play a huge part in informing our work as it should give our overall performance more sincerity (if thats what we're after). In light of this, I sent everyone a George Bridgman's drawing book 'BRIDGMANS - Complete Guide to Drawing from Life', particularly for its two sections on balance and rhythm that are definitely worth a review. I also decided to share this artist's work with the group - he's one of many of my favourite sculptors. He tends to use a lot of circus acts as a subject matter for his work. Please take a look at his drawings/prints as well if you can and you should see how much they must inform his sculptures. Please click here to view his website Although these references are 'still', I find it easy to imagine his pieces/drawings as potential key frames for an animated sequence, and I think theres no doubt that key frames are a good place to start. Throughout the week we had all been sharing various references within the group, from Buster Keaton, Marcel Marceau, Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx to modern mime and Mr bean remakes. I managed to find some good reference of a mime artist acting out a rope pull. Scrub to 01.50 seconds for rope pull. Bev was now working on writing a full script for us to work from. As I had just been to an amazing master class on story telling with Frank Ash from the BBC, I'd been thinking about good story telling and how much we could cut ours down in the interest of trying to put across the most important information. Also because it still felt a bit long. Since the brief is to do a 1 to 2 minute film and because I have no idea how the actual production of this will pan out, I was all in favour of making this closer to the 1 minute mark - this way we can also spend time getting things right.. Our animation is primarily going to be about our mime, it's his story and his dog is just a catalyst for the ending I suppose, as well as a means of fulfilling one of the exercises. With that in mind, I'd been trying to think about how we want to portray our character and how this can best be portrayed - By the end of the animation our character reveals that he is invisible; this could equally be a devious act as well as one of self-pity. So I suppose a good script development question is - In the events leading up to this end, how do we best prepare our audience's anticipation for which one of these it is going to be? Corbin (our mime) gives up in the end because he is unhappy, and at the moment we are making scenarios to make him unhappy gradually, but I started thinking that we should just convey his unhappiness from the start. Here are early revisions of the storyboard that I have been working on. I had been keen to experiment with different camera angles and had also been sitting down with Amy discussing techniques and sharing ideas. She had collected some good books, which made me realise that I should probably do the same soon.. At the moment I am just playing around with interesting shots that could tell the story and I'm having a stab at jumping between parts of the narrative simultaneously for the opening scene. At the start our mime is putting on make up getting ready to walk to work. Here we can get close to the mime and give the misleading impression that he is very real. Also at the start we need to be introduced to his invisible dog. This is where I have been play with cuts to alternate between the two sequences, but I'm still try to get it to read properly.