Dialog and accents

- [Instructor] If I'm going to animate a scene where I'm doing a dialogue action, as we are in this scene, the first thing we do is listen to the dialogue. In the exercise files folder, we have the audio file. If you want to play it yourself, you don't have to. It's just there for convenience. I'm going to play it in my favorite media player, PotPlayer. You might prefer VLC or some other media player. Use whichever is easiest for you and play the audio. - [Man] What's that? What's that? What's that? - [Instructor] And this is what we used to do before we had computer audio files, we played it on a cassette tape. Rewind, play again, rewind, play again. - [Man] What's that? What's that - [Instructor] After a while, you begin to hear the music and the tonality of the dialogue and the accents, the stresses, where is the voice going down? Where is it going up? So in this case, it's very simple. - [Man] What's that? - [Instructor] Let's go into Photoshop and just draw it. Now you can draw this accent graph on a piece of paper. Doesn't have to be Photoshop, just draw a basic line and then what's that? Let's go back and play it one more time. - [Man] What's that? - [Instructor] And I think we can pretty safely say it starts about here, was down, what's that? And the biggest accent is about here. And I think I would plot that at somewhere around there. So that's our accent, very simple, it's a V. The longer dialogue lines have much more complex accent plots. There's an arch form to find out what's the simplest. In this case, we're a very simple accent plot. And it's very important then that when we begin to animate the scene, that it corresponds with this reading, with this accent, because were I to project the accent the incorrect way, and then animate the figure accordingly, that would look really, really weird. So now that we have the dialogue accents correctly plotted, we're ready to proceed to the thumbnails.