Collaboration: Research - Acting for Animators; Interviews with Ed Hooks

Listening to some interviews with Ed Hooks, I made some notes below each video of some key things.

• The difference between actors and animators is, animators don’t work in the present moment like actors do. 

• Actors are told to stay away from acting in the mirror because for them it’s like being on the stage and in the audience at the same time and it’s an impossible thing. Animators use mirrors and video references, but they are too aware, they’re aware of the scene and the movements and of themselves, Hooks reckons it would be better to see Animators use their friends more than themselves to act and reference. 

• He talks about how in Frozen there is fault in their storytelling and acting, there’s confusion over who the protagonist is, is it the character we follow throughout the story, who has no development (Anna) or is it Elsa, the Queen who has gone through character development by the end of the story and without her there’d be no plot. 

• Another fault is the villain in the story - Hans, throughout the story there is no foreshadowing that he’s the antagonist. When Elsa freezes the town his face doesn’t falter considering something totally unplanned has potentially sabotaged his plans; plus we don’t get the reveal until the third act close to the end. 

• Humans learn survival skills indirectly through story telling.

• The most important rule of acting is emotion tends to lead to action, the audience empathise with a character. They see what the character is doing and with empathy look underneath the action and identify with the emotion, that is how you get an audience to care. 

• The actor is the character on the screen, the animator is not the actor, an animator learns to see the world through the eyes of the character. The actor is the personality of the character. 

• Theatrical reality is for telling a story so you only show the parts of reality that are essential for informing an audience, you compress time and space and it has structure. You need conflict and obstacle where regular reality doesn’t have that all the time. 

• Acting is… behaving believably in pretend circumstances for a theatrical purpose. 

• Shakespeare said the actor should hold a mirror up against nature, you need to see nature and understand all the connections thinking, emotions and physical actions. An animator and actor needs to see more - why are people doing what they’re doing. 

• Everyone is the hero in their own life - even villains, we all star in our own movie and think about how are we presenting ourselves to the world. 

• Power centres are where we move from, you can move a power centre around, the higher the power centre the quicker the rhythm - anxiety is high power centre, tight and uncertain feeling like you’re going to fly away. Confidence is a low power centre - manifests in relaxed, centred, grounded, weight. This stops characters moving the same way. 

• The Iron Giant is a good example of good acting in animation, original toy story, Coraline and Up (first hour or it, mainly Carl and Ellie). That’s an example of how acting has nothing to do with words. 

• Up violates the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ principle, paradise valley where they meet Doug the talking dog via his magic collar, the audience is not ready for that as it was not set up in the first act. Same with Walle - you’re in space and not prepared for all the fat people.

Collaboration: Research - Acting for Animators

Since we have our first acting class Monday I decided to start reading Acting for Animators by Ed Hooks (Third Edition) which talks about how we use acting in animations, here are some notes I made.

Seven Essential Acting Principles

1. Thinking tends to lead to conclusions and emotions tends to lead to action. (“The mind is the pilot” - Disney, 1935 - when it comes to characters) emotion feels like they exist independently from thought unless we make a conscious effort to analyse it. Emotions begin and ends with the thinking brain - “I think therefore I am” - René Descartes, 1637. 
2. We humans empathise only with emotion. Your job as a character animator is to create in the audience a sense of empathy with your character. 
3. Theatrical reality it's not the same as regular reality. 
4. Acting is doing; acting is also reacting. 
5. Your character should play action until something happens to make him play a different action. (Obstacle). 
6. Scenes begin in the middle not at the beginning. 
7. A scene is a negotiation. Negotiations you have to be able to win or lose, there are three types of conflict when it comes to negotiation: self, environment or situation. 

• Every scenes needs conflict, objective and obstacle for it to be theatrical. 
• Emotion - An automatic value response. Our emotions depend on how much we value something and the mental associations we hold. 
• Empathy - Feeling into. Empathy is we feel into the same thing as a character. Psychotic people cannot empathise which is what makes them psychopaths, they could kill a family at dinner then finish their dinner with no remorse because they cannot feel into anything. 
• Sympathise - Feeling for. Sympathy is we feel for our character, but we don’t want an audience to sympathise for our character for too long as they will emotionally disconnect with our character. Human nature is survival so when a character wallows too long in negatives and can’t get it together they pursue death over life and we are hardwired to respond negatively to that behaviour. 
• Anticipation is different for actors than it is animators. For animators it means to anticipate a movement like a baseball player throwing a ball. For actors it's an error to anticipate something before it actually happens, i.e. answering a phone before it rings.

Insight Perspectives and Suggestions

• Acting is more about what is underneath the words. When we have a thought, it is not the word that emerges first; it is head and eye movement, shoulder and neck movement. 
• The higher the power centre, the quicker the rhythm of the character. Anxiety is a high and heady power center. Confidence, on the other hand, manifest itself in a feeling of weight, a low power centre. 
• Goofy’s power centre was underneath his feet, pushing him straight up. When he walked it was as if he was on bedsprings because he was moving forward by the power center was pushing up. 
• Our sense of sight is a lot more powerful than our sense of hearing so what you show is going to count for more than what you tell it. 
• Do not put a gesture and with every word. The impulse to communicate comes from within and just gestures are a primary a form of expression as words are. Think of them as a form of truth telling for a character. Get inside and connect with his feelings and let that be the motivation for gesture. 
• Psychological gestures are gesture we do that we don’t realise we do like fiddling with a ring or bring a hand to the mouth a lot whilst talking etc. 
• Humans often contradictory messages. It is normal but unconscious behaviour for the words to say one thing and our body to say another.