Frederik Villumsen

I always enjoy to see how other people aproach their work, but it is usually not easy to come by the first rough idea sheets. Maybe because they look messy and got ugly drawings on them or perhaps they get lost in the big piles of paper! i don't know. Nonetheless I would like to share my aproach to the dialogue assignment I am doing.

I did this last night and I use it as sort of a brainstorm phase, where I close in on what I want. First I simply write the words of the dialogue. I divide them into phrases to have room for notes as well as to keep an overview. I kept on listening to the dialogue, while I started to act out the scene as I imagine it in my head. Just through acting it out a few times in what would seem the same way, I pick up on some small subtle gestures or maybe poses that make sense to me.
For example : In my scene, the main character, the hairdresser, is talking to his customer about his late wife. I want him to act as a hairdresser throughout the scene, while his mood and thoughts drift away in another direction. So his secondary actions wont put emphasis on what he is saying, but on what he is thinking. "She was very protective..." is his first phrase. In this phrase, the beginning of the scene, I want him to nostalgicly think back on his wife. So I had my idea for the mood of the character. Now I need to figure out how I can put emphasis on this through his secondary actions. I once made a drawing of this guy pouring water in the hair of his customer and I tried in my acting to put this in, but it either got in too early or too late the first five or ten times I acted it out. Then I tried to start pouring the water in the customers hair before the dialogue starts. I really liked what this did for the scene. It sets just the mood I want and he is now starring into the water as it is falling from the vase as he is saying the phrase.

Long example! This is how I am building up the acting of my scene. I love doing dialogue scenes, because I have something very solid to work from, before even starting to draw. I continued to work through the phrases like this and I kept adding small notes about mood, actions and whatnot.
I will go through the other phrases as well as I did in the example above, but it will be in my next post accompanied by the sketches I did for the phrase.