Key Text: Acting for Animators by Ed Hooks (Third Edition)

I can see this book being extremely useful when it comes to writing my essay, especially as an introduction into performance. Hooks goes into great detail about the difference between how stage actors and animators perceive and apply acting theory, as well as the 'seven essential acting principles', which are;

- Thinking leads to conclusions, and emotion tends to lead to action.
Emotion being an automatic value response. "You feel emotion, and you do something about it."
- We humans empathize only with empathize only with emotion. 
Create in the audience a sense of empathy for your character. Too much sympathy will cause the audience to distance itself from your character emotionally.
- Theatrical Reality is not the same thing as regular reality.
In 'regular reality' everything is shown, whereas theatrical reality has form and is condensed in time and space. show parts that tell a particular story, and conflict is essential. ACTION, OBJECTIVE, OBSTACLE.
- Acting is doing; Acting is also reacting.
"The temptation is to focus all the time on the doing part. For sure, you don't want to ignore that, but allow for reaction too". A character' reaction has everything to do with their values.
- Your character should play on action until something happens to make him play a different action.
The objective will remain the same, but the actions will change. For example, having salmon for dinner is the objective. Grilling the salmon is an action, but if a conflict occurs where you are out of gas, baking the salmon in the oven is a new action.
- Scenes begin in the middle, not at the beginning. 
Your character will tell you how he is supposed to move when you understand context. What happened before this scene? They also don't end at the end, his scene will continue.
- A scene is a negotiation.
In any negotiation, there needs to be a way you can win and a way you can lose. Example, a fork in the road where one path leads to your destination.


Quotes I considered to be potentially useful/interesting:

"Gestures don't always have to be illustrations of the spoken word"
"What we see a character do is more important than what we hear him say" / "What we see makes a more powerful impression than what we hear"
"When a character is listening, he is busy thinking of things to say in return" "The person who is listening looks into the face of the person who is talking 80% of the time"
"It is the storytellers responsibility to define the parameters within which the audience must suspend its disbelief"
"Starting back in Walt Disney's era, new animators have been encouraged to 'take an acting class' to learn first hand how acting works. That is excellent advice except that animators create animated characters in a very different way than actors create characters on stage"
"To adhere to realism is to abide by the laws of physics, weight and volume"

- Anticipation means different things to Actors and Animators.
To actors, anticipation is an acting error, as they are reacting to something before it happens, whereas to an animator, it is 'what the pitcher does when he winds up to throw a ball'. It is an important distinction because if you want to create the illusion of life, your character will have to learn not to anticipate.

The Final Year: Initial Thoughts and Getting Started

After a long summer, I'm ready to make the final push towards finishing my time at University. I think.
At the end of last year I proposed looking into Performance for my dissertation, and I'm still thinking that this is the way forward. I'm very much interested in this as a dissertation topic, as it is one that I think will benefit me greatly, being interested in pursuing traditional animation. Not only this, but I would love to learn more about what makes a good performance, and how this can be used to benefit my practice further.


As it stands, I'm not sure just yet what I'm going to focus on/write about for this project. Though I have made a start at getting down ideas.

- What makes a good performance?
- How important are references? Does bad reference result in bad animation?
- How performance can effect how much/well we relate to characters
- Uncanny valley
- Talking to professionals about video referencing and the importance of it
- Take an acting class?
- Questioning animators/dancers/actors?
- Analysis of good/bad performances
- Creating animation line tests based on found out information
- Testing how well performance can be captured using different media/animation programs/techniques

After speaking with Annabeth:
- Good practice of an animated performance. If you don't do this, what happens?
- History of animated performance
- Is it a luxury that small companies don't reference on the same scale as, say, Disney, who are famous for their referencing.
- How do you get around not having reference?
- Line tests of simple movements, animated without and with reference.
- Comparison of with/without reference to rotoscoping


I think the potential is there for an interesting dissertation, but at this moment I think I need to focus on expanding my initial sources and key texts. Once I have expanded my initial knowledge on this subject, I will have a better understanding of which direction I want to take my essay in.