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

I took out the first edition of Ed Hooks' book to see if there was anything it in that the third edition had missed out. Most of what the book covers I had previously read about, but I did find that there were a few chapters about live referencing and rotoscoping, that I thought would be useful to me.

Live Action Reference:
- Most voice-over sessions are videotaped for later reference
- Valuable reference but it has some limitations
- "What an actor does with a line in front of a microphone in a recording studio is not necessarily what he would do with that same line if he was playing a scene on location or on stage."

Rotoscoping:
- "...by definition, a second-generation performance, so you're already swimming upstream if you want to create a sense of theatrical spontaneity in the animation."
- "...possibility that the original live-action performance you are rotoscoping lack a 'feeling for acting' in the first place."

Mocap:
- "Once the performance is thus captured, it falls to the animator to take the computer image and enhance it, to make it into animation. The basic movement is already taken care of, so the animator just has to fill in the blanks, so to speak."
- Can be a big money-saver
- "Most animators actively hate mocap because it puts them into a secondary position creatively. The live performers have already delivered the essence - and, what is worse, the live performance itself may well be lacking if its focus is on movement rather than performance."
- Can only use it for human figures
- Can't capture the motion of a skinny person and turn it into animation for a fat person, because weight moves differently with skinny and fat.

Look of Memory:
- "Understanding the way memory works is important to animators because there is a particular kind of expression on the face of a person who is remembering something."
- "A bad actor 'indicates' the act of remembering. He'll scratch his head, stroke his chin."
- "The act of remembering tends to still a person, not animate him."
- "Not only does a face involved in memory become more still, the eyes shift in predictable ways."
- "When you remember something, you do not continue to gaze straight ahead."