Archive for year 2010

Every once and while commercials come around that are just brilliant. This commercial caught my eye, not only for it’s originality and attention to detail, but also for the acting choices. This is not meant to be anything in depth, but I thought I’d point out some things I thought worked well and what maybe didn’t.

First watch the clip:

The first thing that stuck out to me was how fresh and spot on the acting choices were for our main character. Besides his surroundings and what he’s literally saying, you get so much support about who he is by how he acts and the way he moves.

I’ll just list my favorite parts and what I think they communicate:
- Overall, his movements are slower and more controlled. One of my former acting teachers told me that an easy acting choice to show class is to think that the poor and lowly move very fast and scurry around while the rich and powerful move only a minimal amount since everything is done for them. When he sits back into the chair, notice it’s at his pace. His point towards the bust he prefers lingers there and he only retracts his index finger. Again, all very minimal, but of course, meaningful at the same time.
- His status is also portrayed at the very beginning because he neither looks at the grape he’s about to eat nor does he look back when he hands the bowl away. This shows that he expects everything to be in it’s place and bending to his very will. Again, small choice, but makes a big difference.
- When he chooses the bust he likes best, two things stick out to me. First, he never has to look back at the other bust to compare. Second, the fact that he chooses so quickly. Both of these things show that he knows what he likes and always gets what he wants.
- When he sits down on the couch and turns on the TV his movement is, again, very minimal. Think about how powerful that is and then think about how you would have animated it if you got that line of dialog. I don’t know about you, but I would have over-animated it. I can already think of a couple of head accents and such that I would have added. I would have been wrong.
- “I jump in it.” is another great example of how we, as animators, would have totally over-animated a piece of dialog. My first reaction to the line would be to maybe add an eyebrow accent, but all he does is a head nod. Just awesome.
-That laugh and reaction to kissing the mini giraffe is priceless. Not only does it cap off the commercial with a fun idea, but it serves a few interesting purposes. First, the most obvious is to show how spoiled he is. He laughs like a kid in a candy store. Second, considering he was pretty minimal throughout the commercial, this adds brilliant contrast. The minimal movement earlier in the commercial serves not only to show his character, but also to accent this last acting choice. If he was as giddy for the whole commercial, this last bit would not have sold.

Now this commercial isn’t all roses. The pretty lady sitting right next to him on the couch WAY overacts. My assumption is that she should be playing bored and unimpressed maybe. Just too much movement and too many ideas going on to be believable.

Let me know your thoughts.

|Ben