After living a quite sedentary lifestyle due to the pandemic (which I am not proud of), this class was quite a shock to my system, in a good way. I could say that this was one of the classes that I’ve been very curious about.
There are some interesting topics that we learned from this class. The first one was about Laban efforts, which consisted of punch, dab, slash, glide, press, flick, wring, and float. I think that the understanding of Laban would help us as an animator to be more familiar with movement vocabulary and how to assign these qualities to build our character.
The next is about the seven levels of tension. Where we learned about different levels of tension in movement. These levels are:
- Level One – basically no tension at all (Catatonic). In learning this Level one, we got to be paired up and try to understand how the body is when there was no tension given, by moving our partner’s body when they are relaxed.
- Level Two (Californian) is when we gave minimal effort and are super chill and laidback in moving, like a drunk person or a zombie.
- Level Three (Economic) is when we give just an economical effort to do things, basically a straightforward movement.
- Level Four (Alert) is when we become more alert and aware of our surroundings.
- Level Five (Suspense) Is when we are more reactive and responsive to our surroundings, like those feeling when we are scared or tensely waiting for something to happen.
- Level Six (Passionate) Is when everything explodes, where the emotions are let out.
- Level Seven (Tragedy) is when the emotion and tension are at the highest level that the body goes very still.
Another acting exercise that we did was to understand how the changes in body parts’ movement and angle could build different types of walking for characters. It was an interesting and a funny sight to see everyone improvising a Character walk. The walking exercise is continued by reaction or mood change exercise, where we acted out a reaction scene moment by moment. These moments that built the reaction scene are: Stopping, Looking, Reacting, Checking your surroundings, Leaving/Changing of mood.
I feel like I learned a lot by being in this acting class. Sometimes it may not be the most comfortable position to find myself in because I am quite shy, but through the weeks I got more comfortable doing the exercises, which is a good thing.