Animation, Hillary Duff, Chris Farley

This morning, while waiting for Sean in the lobby of his new pre-school, I worked on Photoshopping the scanned words that will be assembled into the codex animation. This is the final exposition video that Ben's character has assembled from various bits of media and old newspapers and magazines. Working on the text reminded me in a weird way of a Hillary Duff promo that Sean and I see over and over again on his year-old, taped-off-the- Disney Channel tape. Duff is doing one of those talk and smile things where she looks at the camera and says a couple of lines like "Lizzie McGuire on the Disney channel!" She does it beautifully and unselfconsciously with all these different emotions rippling through her face, sometimes shy, sometimes dreamy, always engaging. I wonder how you direct these things and keep your performers unselfconscious? I remember Lisa Whelchel's segment on the Facts of Life intro where her pasted-on smile couldn't hide her self-consciousness. It got me speculating that maybe you have to direct by giving actors permission. So you put yourself at risk by coming up with stupid scenarios and your willingness to be stupid breaks the ice for the actor.

Maybe I got this idea from watching Penelope Spheeris direct. I forgot if I wrote about this but I once spent two hours watching her direct a scene from Black Sheep. It was the part where Chris Farley finds some teenagers drinking in a old car. He starts to drink with them but then goes all Matt Foley on them talking about the evils of drinking. (The scene ended up being a three-second shot narrated by henchman). Anyway, as I watched them shoot, Spheeris told one of the teen extras "if you want to be an actress you can't worry about how you look" and then she started dancing like a drunk woman at a party, swiveling her hips with her hands up in the air.



Sorry for the flashback in a flashback. So, what I want in the codex text segment is to create an unselfconscious animated performance—animated in both senses as in frame animation and as in "changing and alive" like Hillary Duff. One way I hope to achieve the sense of unselfconsciousness is by playing with the way type is typically used. In typography, you traditionally minimize the size and visual weight of unimportant words like "a," "the," and "of." In the case of the codex video, I'm putting the words together with no particular size relationship in mind so a lot of unimportant words will be visually emphasized. I think this will create a spontaneous feel. To create the sense of emotional change/animation, I'm looking for text sources that have different associations. For example, I want to scan the word "once" from a storybook (as in "once upon a time). And I want to scan the word "new!" from an ad. I like the idea of having all of these unexpected/expected associations running simultaneously with a narration about cults and conspiracies. It's funny to reflect on all of this because until I jotted these thoughts down, I hadn't really thought about what I was doing and how I was trying to derive a performance from a sequence of type.