Ed Hooks- Acting for animators notes Part 1

Ed hooks, author of ‘Acting for Animators’ has a Stockpile of tips regarding how acting skills can be implemented into animation. If you can’t attend one of his master classes, I’d recommend you take a look at his book and sign up to his monthly newsletter, where you can read his craft notes on new releases.
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Stage actors work in the present movement, animators work in an illusion of the present moment, but the acting principles are the same.

Emotion and empathy

Ed Hooks describes emotion as an ‘Automatic Value Response’. While thinking tends to lead to conclusions, emotion tends to lead to action. Humans only empathise with emotion. Empathy literally translates as ‘Feeling into’ unlike Sympathy where the audience ‘feels for’ the character. While sympathy can work for short periods of time, ultimately you want the audience to relate to your character, that’s where empathy comes in. Ed had the example of the opening scene in ‘The Emperors New Groove’ to illustrate the use of sympathy where there should have been empathy. When a character stops making an effort to secure his or her own survival, the audience cannot empathise with them.



Empathy doesn’t work for characters you can control completely; it requires a certain amount of distance. In games when you have full control, you can’t empathise with the character. If it gets eaten by a zombie as it was you that made it happen. In The Sims however, the user has a certain amount of control but the characters ultimately have their own free will, their own personality, motives and reactions to your influences. The audience could feel empathy in the right situations. While they can take away all the windows and doors to a room, they cannot stop the Sim inside from crying or complaining of hunger. Read my review on The Sims 3 here.

Moving illustration vs. performance

Reality is very different from theatrical reality. In reality, you get 100% of everything, boring or not. In theatrical reality scenes are constructed for the purpose of telling a story, each scene has form.

If you can freeze frame a character at any given moment and understand what they are doing at that moment in time, then you have a good scene. Good performance is the following:



An action in pursuit of an objective, overcoming an obstacle

A character plays an action until something happens to make them play a different action. Obstacles= Conflict, there are three types:

• Conflict with self
• Conflict with a situation
• Conflict with a person

A child character mostly encounters conflicts with their situation, even if that involves another person. For example when Coralline wants to plant seeds in the rain and her mother doesn’t allow her to, this is conflict with her situation. Coralline, like most young children, accepts the authority of her mother so her conflict is with her situation, the rain outside more than anything else.