Month: May 2019

Animation exercise: A bad death scene

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A Wild Hare, Tex Avery, 1940

I am always looking out for fun animation exercises. Very few student animation demo reels actually make me laugh. There are too many fight scenes or parkour shots that can demonstrate skill but are rarely entertaining.

Here is a new challenge. Animate a bad actor doing a death scene. It’s all about overacting, so it’s perfect for exaggerated animation. I have collected several video examples for inspiration. All but one of these use guns as the weapon, but other methods of death could work just as well. Poisoning would have its own special contortions. Multiple arrow strikes could inspire other ideas.

We’ll start with what might be the best bad death scene. There so many things wrong with this. The crazy expressions, the bad framing, the cheap and badly timed effects. The guy gets shot several times and drags it out way too long. The final look to the camera. If you’re not entertained by this, quit now and go do something else.

I am going to focus here on live actors as inspiration, but there is, of course, one very famous example of an overacted death scene in cartoons. At about 39 seconds, note his left hand as he weakly covers his cough, then the delicate finger action, before it hits the ground with a heavy slap. From A Wild Hare (1940)

As you can see, the death scene can involve being cradled by the killer while last words are spoken. Jim Carrey followed up with this in The Mask.

This one is short and sweet. It’s funny for the one expression the guy has before falling out of frame. Extra points for the ninja star.

This SNL short gets laughs with common tropes found in murder scenes. Repetition makes it ever more ridiculous, with variations thrown in for good effect. They almost underact the moment of getting shot, like it’s more shock than pain.

Overacted death scenes appear to be quite popular in Indian film making. Here are three great examples.

The video I opened with is so popular, it is has spawned parodies. This one brings a different energy and shows how much room there is to play with this exercise.

Basil Wolverton’s Vaudeville connection

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A sample of Wolverton’s work:

I recently purchased “The Wolverton Bible” through Amazon. I have always enjoyed Wolverton’s illustration. The book includes an introduction by Grant Geissman, and I found this fun fact:

Before becoming a cartoonist, Wolverton had actually started out as a young Vaudeville performer in theaters in Oregon and Washington.  “Eventually I heard or read,” recalled Wolverton, “that a two bit actor earns even less than a two bit cartoonist”

The introduction goes on to say the Wolverton was a devout Christian and took the job of illustrating the Bible very seriously.

On this excellent site, I learned this fun trivia fact about him.

Other sources of income were provided by his job as a journalist/cartoonist for the Portland News. One of his most exciting assignments was visiting the set of the film ‘The General’ and meeting Buster Keaton in person.

Wolverton’s work has a very sculpted quality about it, and it begs to be animated. I found this really well-done claymation based on his designs.

For a nice bio of Basil, with illustrations, I recommend THIS PAGE