My latest sermon. (It's Sunday, ya know...)
I think one could entirely separate acting from animating, in a sense. I'll explain. I see so much "character" animation out there that doesn't get anywhere close to acting, although it has "characters". A lesson I've learned from Richard Williams' book, and that haunts me, is that the Method can make or break things. The way you go about it - you could have a good way of working that makes it all easy for you, all seems to naturally fall into place, so you can be creative and stay on top of the situation, or you could fight your way through ineffectively and curse the very day you've been born, 'cause all seems like it's not meant to work. We, as animators, learn how to animate, that is... posing and timing and paths of action, all that jazz. But, first of all, what do we animate??? Here's the methodological problem, I think: acting is spontaneous, while animators follow rules to keep everything clearly structured in their work, they pay attention to squash and stretch and anticipation and follow through and overlapping and so on - it's all math, at the.... math level. But we've left out the inspiration level. Sure there is creativity in the math level too, but what I'm talking about here is mainly: there are 2 levels. Level 1 is acting (what we're gonna animate) and level 2 is animating (how we're gonna do it).
Act first, think of what you're going to animate, be inspired, research, understand your character's psychology, build your character (that if it's not already built for you...), do all these things an actor would do, think like an actor, be spontaneous, modern technology allows you to capture that spontaneity - buy a camcorder and film yourself (camcorders are getting fabulously cheap nowadays, and, even cheaper, you can get a digital photo camera - most record video). Well, I don't know much actually about what 'real' actors do to build their characters, and I mean.... good actors, that actually spend a lot of time getting into that character's mind and body. I need to read more on this. But what I realized is the importance of acting before animating. Ed Hooks in Acting for Animators is preaching a way that blends acting and animating, because he saw that animators are not comfortable with acting (well, especially not in front of an audience). I think a lot of the best animators are actually great actors, behind closed doors. So acting is a necessity. What I'm preaching (well, I'm not the only one, so it's not My method) is a separation of the 2. And maybe the only way to separate them is to actually film yourself - you can't be spontaneous and aware of your acting at the same time. But then use the video as an analysis tool, break it down and further improve on what you've got there. It works for realistic and cartoony. If you need realism, you can analyze in depth all the details of the movement, if you need cartoony stuff, you can, for instance, only use the key/main poses and exaggerate those. If you need to animate a dragon... well, research birds, other creatures, other animated dragons... but if that dragon needs to talk/act, you definitely can find a great help in filming yourself here too. A gesture can translate from a human to a bird to a mouse to a snake to whatever, even an object, such as a book or a lamp ;)
Thumbnailing is already part of what I see "level 2" - animation. Being an actor first and only then a draftsman/anatomy guru/Maya master/curves editing freak/etc, etc... knowing what to animate first of all, makes animation an intelligent, focused, and nevertheless creative process. I like to think of the ideal animator firstly as a brilliant actor: he shouldn't be just analyzing Robin Williams, he should be Robin Williams (yeah, I know, lots of people might say I'm crazy - an animator should be able to imitate anyone... sort of "be" anyone. Ammm, so is Robin Williams. Besides that, he is an immensely, enormously, gigantically... appealing/charismatic actor - I see this charisma being more prrrrrecious).
Well, and then there's the film director within. I think that being aware of your work from a director's point of view helps both stages/levels: it helps the actor in understanding the dramatic tools he's using, and the animator in shaping his shots.
Anyway, that's it for now. Preaching yo helps me actually understand things better... If I write about them I put some order into my thoughts (well, slowly, post by post, they get organized). So, anyway, thanks for reading, let me know what you think, and may God bless you all! Sermon over. Amen!
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About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
February 2022
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