Acting for Animators – A Complete Guide to Performance Animation

By Ed Hooks

Heinemann, 2003, 130 pages

This is a very different book on the Animation topic than any other books I read so far. My background being in illustration and comics, I have no trouble reading about drawing or animating and the technical aspects related to those skills but reading on the subject of "acting" is very new to me and so, there were many concepts that were new and were discoveries. So much so that I decided to reread the same book again in the next few days, this time with a yellow marker. Nevertheless, I decided to write a review of the book just to expose the general feeling I had while reading it.

Mr Hooks is well known in the animators community. He gives courses to animators around the world and is hired by studios like Dreamworks and Disney to train their animators in the subtleties of acting. The first thing he clears is that animators are not actors and cannot be actors. While an actor is trained to stay in the present moment and play the feeling that goes with it, the animators can never be in the present moment of the character they are animating. Another way to say that is that for an actor, it is considered bad acting to "expose" the feeling of the character they are playing while an animator cannot do otherwise but to expose the feeling of the characters they are animating. Mr Hooks goes at length at explaining why this is so and for me, that made me understand why persuing character realism in animation is futile because an impossibility. Mr Hooks wrote a small section discussing the difference between animating and motion captures that goes further in that ditrection BTW.

So the book is not about how to be a good actor but about a few tricks, concepts and exercises that actors use to find the heart and the present moment of their characters. In relation to that, the two concepts that I have retained after this first read are the concepts of "negociation" and "center of power". There are much more important acting related concepts in the book and that is why I need to reread it.

A lot of us have already heard that a scene needs conflict to be effective. Mr Hooks prefer to talk about negociation. And this opens a whole new dimension to the concept of conflict. At least, to me, it seemed much less restrictive and thus a much more open concept. One interesting result of reframing "conflict" into "negociation" is that it places the focus on the acting. What does the character needs or wants? What is he going to do to obtain what he needs? How is he going to do it? What does he needs to overcome? etc. That is one aspect I will try to think about for the next scene I have to animate.

The other concept I retained is the "Center of Power". The way I see it, the power center is an imaginary power source that drives us. It determines our attitude in what we do and how we deal with other peoples. The power center can be placed before us and pull us or behind us and push us. It can be placed at any level. Above the head, at the chest level, at the feet level, and any level in between. It can be moved around too according to mood change etc. I found this concept very interesting and usefull. I could easily visualize how it can be played with on an animated character and how it can drive the animation of that character. I also tried the exercise where this power center is shifted around as I walk and see how it affected my walking attitude. This is all imaginary but very usefull in its application.

I would not put "Acting for animators" in the "How-to" category. But I find the "Power Center" concept to be quite an "How-to" concept. It is a much more abstract concept than the "vanishing point" concept used in perspective drawing for instance but it feels almost the same sort of concept applied on the character motion domain.

"The audience's obligation is to suspend its disbelief and play along with you. The audience relates to the characters on screen but it communicates with you, the animator. In the final analysis, the transaction involves humans communicating with other humans. Not humans communicating with drawn images."

Ed Hooks

Ed Hooks approach to teaching acting for animator is based on the theory that it is an impossibility, for an animator, to be both an animator and an actor at the same time. When an actor do a scene, the acting comes from within. The actor is the subject of the acting. The actor just is in the present moment of the scene and lives the emotions of the scene at this moment and then the next moment is something else. The actor flows with each sequencial instants of the scene.

When an animator do a scene, the character is the object of the acting and this object is remotely manipulated by the animator. The animator is not the character and the character does not feel or have a mood or emote in any ways. It is only through manipulating the character through time that the animator gives the illusion that the character have an internal life. Animating a character takes time and is a successive refinement process. So not only the animator does not live in the instantaneity of each moments of the scene, but also, the animator may come back to visiting the same moments over and over until the animation feels right. While an animator could also be a good actor, it is impossible, for an actor to act and observe its own acting at the same time. The simple attempt at observing the acting while doing it makes the acting non natural anymore. For this reason, Mr Hooks believes that the ubiquitous mirror that every animator have on its desk should be replaced by a video camera.

Based on this theory, Mr Hooks eliminates a lot of traditional acting exercises when teaching acting to animators and instead concentrates on a few acting "rules" that are used by actors to place themselves into the appropriate mood when acting or when preparing for acting and also concentrates on providing conceptual tools that are teached to actors, that should guide and help in honing the sense of observation that every animator should develop. Observing real life peoples is something that every good actor learn to do. Actors observe people around them and memorize typical or particular behaviors they see so they can reuse them when needed eventually. Animators should do the same thing.

For example, one of the acting "rules" is that a character should always be doing something 100% of the time. Even when not on screen. The animator should always be thinking of the character as a living creature that, even though is not on screen at one particular moment, might be doing something of interest to him or required by him. This way, when a character is introduced in a scene or is shown in the first frames of a scene, he is not just standing there idle but was doing something and might be interrupted by the new situation introduced by the scene or he might have been thinking or planing or expecting something before he enters the scene. The way the character might react to this new situation is greatly influenced by what he was involved with before the scene started. Is he upset because he got interrupted? Is he disapointed because hes expectations were not met? etc. Given this, a scene can never start at a beginning but rather must start in the middle of something that was already happening. This is a concept I already knew concerning story writing but it is the first time I see it applied to acting as well. Good concept.

In the "Observing real life" category of advices, of course, Mr Hooks mentions observing people walking and moving for all sort of tasks but, more interesting, he discusses how people are driven by their internal thought processes, moods and emotions. Those internal processes are perceivable in their attitude, their body posture, their hand gestures, their facial expressions, even the way people are dressed and the environment they are in. When observing real life peoples, it is revealing to constantly look at the signs of mood changes and tought processes. And when animating, those internal thought processes and mood changes should also be shown and animated. Thoughts precede conclusions and emotions precede action. Thoughts and emotions are distinct and they can and should both be animated. A character should not act just because it is written in the script but because of a reaction to something that happened. A stimulus. And this stimulus can be visible in the scene or it can be implied from the life of the character and it can even be internal to the thoughts of the character. A character without emotions and actions is just a model. Add thoughts, emotions, motivations and corresponding actions and you start having a real character.

This touches on the aspect of empathy. Viewers will better relate with a character, be it a hero or a villain, if it can ampathize with the character. Concerning villain, Mr Hooks warns that villain characters should also induce empathy so thay don't just look too unidimensional. Empathy is a vast and complex subject and Mr Hooks gives numerous examples to make it understandable. But roughly, empathy is produced when the viewer can perceive some humanity in the character. For this, the character would show some human feelings, emotions and motivations. Some of the most appealing motivations are "primal" motivations. That is motivations related to survival: eating, protection from predators, sleeping, sex. According to Mr Hooks, just one single hint of those primal motivations in an entire movie is enough to win empathy from the audience toward a character. There are also some main events in the life of a character that Mr Hooks calls "Adrenaline Moments" which are strong events that anybody would remember for the rest of their life. Showing some of those "Adrenaline Moments" in the life of a character is another device to win empathy from the viewers. But the audience will more generally empathize with emotions. Any emotions that are truely felt by the character and a main objective of an animator should be to find the point of empathy with his character. Empathy is not the same as sympathy.

Mr Hooks also have a few views and opinions about what animation can and should be compared to real life and photorealism and I tend to agree with him. Personally, I think that animation should be styled and represent an artistic expression. I think that pursuing photorealism is a dead-end for animation. We all heard of the "uncany valley", this unconfortable feeling the viewer can experience when looking at "photoreal animation" where there is just this little bit off. Mr Hooks offers an interesting theatrical interpretation of this phenomenon where the viewer is placed in an impossible mind state trying to accept that this is real and at the same time trying to accept that this is a fabrication. I can't do justice to his development on this subject in just a couple lines but I found his analysis enlightening.