INSPIRATION

For those of you who are unfamiliar with A TIME FOR ALL SEASONINGS, these first couple sentences are for you! The film has several characters, all of whom perform on stage in a vaudeville house. The focus of the film is the dancing duo, The Shaker Brothers, performing their soft shoe number...


Basically what I wanted to show was this dancing duo whose gimmick was that they performed on stage as salt and pepper shakers. Originally I just coincieved of them just entering on stage and hopping up on their pedistals to dance their fun little dance.
That idea changed a bit a when I was inspired by a scene from TOP HAT. There is this wonderful moment in the movie where Fred Astaire sifts sand through his fingers and onto the floor and perfoms this wonderful soft shoe number for Ginger Rodgers who is staying in the room below him.

I applied this idea for salt and pepper. So now rather than just coming out on stage and dancing, they bow to the audience, they shake salt and pepper from the top of their heads and sift it through their fingers and onto their pedistals before they dance.

For me, it adds more to the scene now that they come out on stage and acctually DO something related to their character. I took a couple of suggestions from other people as well on how to approach the scene; but it really grew from the scene from TOP HAT:




Here are the original poses for the scene. Four drawings were enough for me to start visualizing and timing out the scene:







Once that was done I sized the drawings to the layout and added a few more poses. Joe Merideth took the revised poses and studied the scene from TOP HAT. He flip-framed through the scene to really understand the shaking and sifting of the salt onto the pedistal. So the poses are mine, but the entire feel of the action is all Joe. He did an amazing job of moving through all the poses I gave him.

So here is the pencil test of the scene. Poses: BJ Crawford Animation: Joe Merideth