Dance : movement study
News . 10 Feb. 2023
This week, third-year students on the 3D Animation and Special Effects Cycle in Nantes had the chance to take part in a new workshop : dance and rapid observation sketches. Here’s how it worked.
From dance to animation
Understanding movement and the breakdown of bodies is essential in 3D animation. It is also useful for 2D animation, which is important for making better animatics.
To this end, Oscar Langevin, animation teacher, has set up a dance workshop. A dancer is a very goodc model for working on bodies and movements. A sutdent from CinéCréatis and a student from ESMA got involved and danced to serve as models.
The workshop was punctuated by various exercises. After warming up and dancing together, the students took out their notebooks and pencils to start drawing. The first choreography, without a break, was used for quick sketches of the movements, without correction. Then the students had just 3 seconds to draw different pauses in the dancer’s movements, followed by 30 seconds for more detail, before concentrating on specific parts of the body.
The teacher also asked them to draw 5 objects on the same theme: fish, mammals, kitchen utensils, costumes and letters in different fonts. The aim? To bring sketches of a pause in the dancer and one of the objects together, creating a metamorphosis in different sketches that would lead the dancer to become an object. The students had to come up with 3 such metamorphoses.
Sketches by Marine Gautier
Objective : master Blender
Blender is a software commonly used in 3D animation. At ESMA, it is used to create the animatics for the film. Following the dance workshop, the students were given an introduction to this software so that they could shape their metamorphosis. This was useful training for the rest of their course, and in particular for their Zapping, an important exercise marking the end of their third year.
Metamorphosis by Marine Gautier