Performance And Acting For Animators

by Judy Lieff

"Animators should focus on the acting...make the characters think and act...start with the body first, next focus on the eyes, and last focus on the mouth. When reviewing reels we look at the acting first." -- John Lasseter, November 4, 1996 during a lecture at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Courtesy of ArtToday.

The actor and the animator may approach creating the life of a character in a similar fashion, but while actors transform themselves into their characters, animators have an additional challenge of maintaining a subjective, as well as an objective, approach to characterization. Therein lies the challenge of finding a form of acting training that will be particularly useful for the animator.

For actors, and particularly for animators, it is useful to develop a keen kinesthetic sense and a thorough understanding of music and rhythm. Frank Gladstone, Director of Training at DreamWorks SKG, feels the animator is responsible for creating characters who not only fit their own voices, but ones who can perform without vocal cues as well. The more keenly developed a kinesthetic sense an actor, dancer, or animator has, the more capacity that artist has to portray various characters and exhibit organic nuances and gestures appropriate to that character.

Researching a number of animation curriculums from academia to commercial studios, and conducting interviews on the subject of acting and performance, as it relates to the professional animator, has shown unanimous agreement on the importance of acting classes for successful animation training. However, there has yet to be any course of study for investigating acting and performance that specifically relates to the expanding requirements of animation. Not only do animators have to understand the process of acting in order to create a character, but they also have to be able to direct and communicate with actors for projects involving live actors for reference or motion-capture.

"Animation is the kind of medium that is such a combination of other mediums that the more you know about music, art, film, choreography, literature, or current events, the better you are going to be. You name it, and it is only going to make you a better animator or better storyteller for animation." -- Craig Kellman, Character Design, Disney Feature Animation

What follows is a series of excerpts from some of the interviews I conducted addressing acting and performance as it relates to the professional animator and his training. From historians to television and feature film to motion-capture and voice actors, I have gathered a number of viewpoints on this critical issue.

source from: http://www.awn.com

The Future of Game Cinematics

Cut scenes are on my mind because of a recent New York Times article about the escalating migration of games away from consoles toward mobile devices. The largest studios are set up to create big games for big budgets, and those big games work best on a big screen. If the migration continues, what happens to cinematics?  They won't look as good or have the same punch on a hand-held screen.  I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that game cinematics are endangered altogether.  Think about it: Cut scenes have always been an imperfect device for delivering story points and character development.  Most cut scenes give the player aesthetic whiplash because he can empathize with characters during the mini-movie, but he cannot empathize with them during game play.  Let me explain.

Just about everybody in the industry today will acknowledge that a game is not a movie.  You play a game and you watch a movie, apples and oranges.  Cinematics were originally intended to be tiny game/movie hybrids. There used to be a lot of lunch break discussion about whether or not a game could "make you cry".   As an acting teacher, I can tell you that, yes, it is possible for a game to make you cry, but probably not with cinematics.  The thing that makes you cry is empathy, identifying with the emotions of an on-screen character.  A baseline requirement for empathy is physical distance.  You cannot empathize with yourself, and a player cannot empathize with his own avatar.  In order for a game to pull the player into an emotional/empathetic transaction, most of the job being done today with cut scenes must be achieved through game play.  In an ideal game, there would be no cinematics at all.  And in order for that to happen, game designers -- especially Level Designers -- must have a working understanding of empathy in humans.

Fumito Ueda brilliantly blazed the trail to empathetic game play with Ico ten years ago, but that game was not financially successful enough to spawn imitators.  Now would be a good time to take a fresh look at what Mr. Ueda accomplished.  The secret ingredient in Ico is that Ico (the player) is the only character that can actually do things.  The queen's daughter, Yorda, is sort of an emotional train wreck, hesitant and afraid.  She won't take the kind of risks that Ico wants her to take, and so he must assist her in order to save her.  The player empathizes with Yorda through the POV of Ico precisely because the player cannot fully control Yorda's behavior.

I usually tell a personal story about empathy in my masterclass.  It concerns a young friend who was playing one of the Sims games a few years back and put a female character in a room with no windows or doors. "I figured she would starve to death in there," he explained to me in an e-mail.  "But then she surprised me and started crying!  And she wouldn't stop!"   My friend finally figured out that his only option was to take the girl out of the room altogether. "I had to find some other way to kill her," he said.  Whoever came up with the idea of the crying girl was on the right track for empathy.  The set-up is similar to the one in Ico. If my friend had been able to flip a switch labeled "Cry/STOP Cry", empathy would have been impossible.

With all of this in mind, I have a few suggestions for developers that want to be the first to cross the finish line when cinematics go away:

1)  There is, in many game studios, a systemic division between programmers/writers/designers and animators.  In the future, that wall must come down. The technical side of the studio - let's call it the left-brainers - must have a better understanding of human behavior - the right-brain part.  It is a mistake to assume that animators alone control character performance.  This is the reason that, whenever I teach at a game company, I practically plead to have the designers and writers attend the class along with the animators.  The fix for the cut scene problem begins with game design, character analysis and scripts.  Therefore, the launch team must take actual for-real human behavior, including the ability to empathize, into account from Day One.

2)  Scripts for most games today are woefully, if understandably,  dialogue-heavy and frequently banal.  This is particularly true in cinematics because they are the device used to convey story points and exposition.  The fact is that acting has almost nothing to do with words.  That is something else that Fumito Ueda understood with Ico. Eliminate all dialogue that is not absolutely essential.  Animators are like stage actors to the extent that they can only work with the script they are given.  Even Anthony Hopkins cannot save some of the scripts out there.

3)  Level Designers are going to have to carry more of the load.  It is essential that Level Designers in the future know as much about story and acting as the animators and scriptwriters do.

4)  Mocap has a lot of room for improvement.  It is getting better, but mocap directors need to learn better how to communicate with actual actors in terms that actual actors understand. A big part of Gollum's success was that Peter Jackson is a live-action director, and he cast Andy Serkis, a well-trained classical actor, in the role.  They knew how to talk to one another in a common language, and that delivered to the animators rich data to work with.

5) Finally, include your animators in these studio adjustments.  Just as the design side needs to learn and incorporate more of the performance side, so too should the animator have a better understand of the design side.  Nobody has to get fired in this transition.  Each member of the studio team needs to expand his knowledge base and become more like a generalist instead of a specialist .  This will take a while, so be patient.  You can't be brilliant in a hurry.

Until next month...
Be safe!

Amazing Mechanical "werewolf" Claws & Stilts

More behind the scenes detail of hand and leg extensions for Farscape alien character "Namtar" for episode "DNA mad Scientist".

This was work I did working with Dave and Lou Elsey for Jim Henson's creature shop in Sydney in the 1990s. The character was performed by mold and foam specialist Adrian Getly. I made the body extensions and worked with long time colleague Matt Ward on the head. We made a counter-current flow cool suit for Adrian to wear to keep him cool under all that gear, based on system I developed on the never filmed Smiths "Gobbledok".





This is the never before publicly seen M.E.G. Gobbledok head mechanised by myself and Matt Ward, with skin and sculpt by Paul Katte and Nick Nicolau from M.E.G. It was an all new update based an earlier Gobbledok design by Warren Beaton, so we had to keep the same sort of look but make it slightly more realistic. Even the addition of he teeth was agonised over by the Ad agency. It was never intended to speak but I tried some dialogue just for fun. Take a look at my later Starwars lipsynch on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID2Fkse1bmg for comparison. Comissioned for a Smith's potato chips ad campaign the Chararcter was finished exactly at the time Smiths changed advertising agencies and not even the original advertising agency saw the final results. The character was to be worn by a short stature suit performer and was fitted with a countercurrent heat exchange refrigerating cool-suit to keep Julie comfortable. The head was fitted with video lcd goggles for Julie with a lipstick camera hidden in the forehead to feed video of where she is facing so she could see without external viewports. The expressions were mixed by computer system and able to be recorded and edited for playback. Greg designed the control system, based on a "mediamation system", later evolving into the mobile "gilderfluke" based editing/playback system used for Star Wars Ep III

The Raptors in Jurassic Park Were So Big Because They Were Humans

The Velociraptor (or, you know, the raptor) is one of the most famous dinosaurs ever, largely because of how they were used to such brilliantly scary effect in the Jurassic Park books and movies. (JP even gets a shoutout just three paragraphs in to the Velociraptor Wiki page.) But as any paleontologist worth his or her salt has likely lamented countless times, the massive, deadly raptors portrayed in the movies are totally wrong. In reality, Velociraptorwas only a few feet tall and had feathers. It was basically a larger, predatory chicken. While they might have been effective predators, they certainly weren’t the size of LeBron James.

Via Stan Winston

But how’s this for wild idea: What if the raptors in Jurassic Park were oversized because they needed to be able to fit a human inside? At the very least, we know that humans did fit inside the JP raptors thanks to the above video from the Stan Winston School of Character Arts, which designed the raptor puppets for the first movie.

Via Stan Winston

Jurassic Park is noted for its excellent use of CGI — as awkward as digital effects can look today, they still blow puppets out of the water for realism when movement is concerned, as a couple Redditors pointed out. Not every shot could work with CGI, so full and half puppets were used. But when all else failed, apparently the man suit came out. According to Stan Winston’s epic post on the suits’ construction, the JP kitchen scene used all three techniques
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Hands 101

Hands 102

Hands 103 Coming Soon!

A Short History (part I)

ROOTS The word 'animation' is derived from anima, the Latin word for soul or spirit. The verb 'to animate' literally means 'to give life to'.From his earliest artworks, hunting scenes sketched in ochre on a cave wall, to highly refined Greek sculptures, mankind has always attempted to imbue his art with expressions of life by depicting his subjects as if caught in a frozen moment in time suggestive of broader preceding and following actions. Egotistical man placed himself at the centre of the universe. He has always believed in the possibility of creating life - of playing god. Man has used his technology as an agent to help realise this desire in order to become ruler of all nature. AUTOMATA History is rich with descriptions of attempts to imitate life by mechanical means in the form of hydraulic, pneumatic, or clockwork operated biological automata. Automata (or automatons - a machine which is relatively self-operating and capable of performing multiple complex movements on its own without the need for human control) had its greatest period of development following the rise of mechanicism with the revival of Greek culture during the Renaissance. There were, for example, isolated descriptions of talking heads claimed to have been constructed by Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Gerbert, and Robert Grosseteste. Perhaps of greater significance was the mechanical lion of da Vinci and the two automata created by Johannes Muller, called Regiomontanus (1436-1476). One of these was the fabled eagle which was claimed to have escorted the Emperor Maximilian to the city gates of Nuremberg. The first android, a completely mechanical figure which simulated a living human or animal, operating with apparently responsive action, is believed to have been constructed by Hans Bullmann of Nuremberg (?-1535). Bullmann reportedly produced a number of extremely ingenious figures of men and women that moved and played musical instruments. These early automata were mechanical devices that seemed to demonstrate lifelike behaviour. They took advantage not only of gears, but also of gravity, hydraulics, pulleys and sunlight - the effect could be dazzling, as with the extraordinary clock of Berne created in 1530. This massive timepiece hourly disgorged a dazzling pageantry of automata figures. One of the most famous waterworks of the seventeenth century was that constructed at the chateau at Heilbrunn in about 1646. It featured various animated hydromechanical devices. A mechanical theatre was installed here in 1725 by Lorenz Rosenegge, a craftsman of Nuremberg. It featured 256 figures, 119 of which were animated by means of a single water turbine. A horizontal axis operating a series of cams regulated the movements of the figures by means of copper wires. The wheelwork consists of wooden wheels with iron teeth and pinions. A powerful hydraulic organ provides background music and covers the noise of the mechanism. Just as the waterworks and grottoes of the Renaissance gardens were tangible revivals of the hydraulic and pneumatic devices of the ancient Greek culture, some of the same influence filtered into the field of clockmaking. The first conversion from the hydraulic and pneumatic to the purely mechanical automata, occurred in Europe with the advent of the clockmaker who made public and astronomical clocks with moving figurines. It was a short step to a combination of the pinned cylinder and the spring-driven clockwork to provide the sound of living things and of musical instruments in automata. This combination made possible a great variety of developments in the late seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries. The most notable of these were the androids constructed in the mid-eighteenth century by Jacques Vaucanson (1709-1782), who brought the production of automata to its highest point of development. Vaucanson is unquestionably the most import inventor in the history of automata, as well as one of the most important figures in the history of machine technology. Although he was responsible for pioneering in the development of machine tools and later inspired the work of Sir Henry Maudslay and others, it was, ironically enough, his automata -- which occupied the briefest interlude in his life -- which brought him permanent fame and fortune. Born in 1709 in Grenoble, France, Vaucanson exhibited great mechanical ability at a very early age. After having attended the oratory college at Juilly he studied with the Jesuits at Grenoble, and in 1725 joined the order of Minims of Lyon. During his training period, however, Vaucanson indulged his mechanical interests by creating automatically flying angels. This impelled the provincial of the order to destroy his makeshift workshop, and Vaucanson used the incident as an excuse to to be relieved of his clerical vows. Vaucanson moved to Paris and, in direct contrast with his recent religious life, gave himself up to a life of debauchery while he undertook the studies of mechanics, music, and anatomy. He developed an interest in the study of medicine and attempted to construct a "moving anatomy" which reproduced the principal organic functions. Debts, illness, and eventually boredom caused him to abandon the project. He went on to the construct his famous androids, which made him wealthy and famous throughout Europe. In 1735 Vaucanson began to formulate plans for the construction of the first android, which was to be a life-sized figure of a musician, dressed in a rustic fashion and playing eleven melodies on its flute, moving the levers realistically by its fingers and blowing into the instrument with its mouth. In October 1737 the automaton was completed and exhibited first at the fair of Saint-Germain and later at Longueville. All Paris flocked to see the mechanical masterpiece with the human spirit; the press was extremely favorable, and Vaucanson was launched upon his career. Vaucanson's third and most famous automaton was "an artificial duck of gilt brass which drinks, eats, flounders in water, digests and excretes like a live duck" (see figure top right). It was Vaucanson's intention to create in this duck the "moving anatomy" that he had visualized once before. Accordingly, the figure of the duck was produced full size of gilt brass in a simplified form, the body pierced with openings to permit the public to observe the process of digestion. The complexity of this duck was enormous - there were over four hundred moving pieces in a single wing. Just as spring-wound clockwork made possible mechanical music for automata, it also made possible the reproduction of the sound of words by mechanical means. In the seventeenth century Kircher had affirmed that it was possible to produce a head which moved the eyes, lips, and tongue, and, by means of the sounds which it emitted, appeared to be alive. A similar project was attempted in 1705 by Valentin Merbitz, rector of the Kreuzschule of Dresden, who devoted five years to it. The next major advance in this field was made in about 1770 by Friedrich von Knauss of Vienna, who constructed four speaking heads. That his project was not completely successful is attested to by the fact that in 1779 the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg used the production of a successful speaking head as the theme for a contest for mechanicians and organ manufacturers, specifying that the machine be capable of speaking the five vowels. - The Turing Test of its day for clocksmiths and mechanical engineers? The most spectacular of all automata that have survived until the present day are The Writer, The Artist, and The Musician produced by Pierre Jacquet-Droz (1771-1790) and his son Henry-Louis (1753-1791) of Geneva. Father and son combined all the technical developments known in their time in an effort to produce a machine that faithfully imitated a human being, and their efforts were as successful as any have ever been. The Writer, a life-size and lifelike figure of a boy seated as a desk, is capable of writing any message of up to 40 letters in length (above right). "On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends" - Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1895. Boilerplate Man and Steam Man - Amazing Robots of the Victorian Era - fact or fiction? You decide:http://www.bigredhair.com/robots/index.html With a public fascination for the newly discovered force of electricity, fictional writing suggested that pieces of dead flesh sewn together could be 'animated' into life just as severed frog legs could be kicked into a reflex action by a crude battery in a science laboratory demonstration. Having discarded the earlier technologies of hydraulics, pneumatics, clockwork, which where thought to hold the key, man continues his quest to create life through robotics and electronics, and with more abstract notions of life using computers to create artificial life (AI), autonomous systems, Celluar Automata and nanotechnology. Man now plays directly with the building blocks of life itself via genetic engineering AIBO - Sony's Artificial Intelligence roBOt. AIBO means 'love' or 'attachment' in Japanese. Many AIBO owners enjoyed teaching their pets new behaviors by reprogramming them in Sony's 'R-CODE' language. However, in October 2001, Sony sent a cease-and-desist notice to the webmaster of of a programming hack site demanding that he stop distributing code that bypassed the copy prevention mechanisms of the robot. Whose life is it anyway? Read the protest: <click here> The AIBO was killed off by Sony in 2006. Nowhere is this obsession to play god and create worlds and to populate them with artificial autonomous life forms more in evidence than in computer games such as "World of War Craft" and "Second Life". Animators are also engaged in this same elusive quest.

What is Animation?

Animation precedes the invention of photography and the cine camera by several decades. It is an art form in which a world of dynamic image and sound may be synthesised completely out of nothing but a thought (see Peter Greenaway quote, right).

Animation is 100% artifice, and as such, the synthesis of movement through the sequential use of small fragments of time, which gives rise to this wondrous illusion, is open to manipulation in extraordinary ways.

Animation is the most nimble of mediums. It has survived the mechanical 'persistence of vision' toys popular in the 19th century; found expression as an art form in cinema; it was the means by which to experiment with time-based art and cinematic forms to present new visual vocabularies; it was brilliantly positioned to pioneer the use of computers to create moving images from numbers; it has demystified complex processes; visualised scientific phenomena and provided simulation models to help us understand the world; it has become an essential ingredient in multimedia content; it is imbedded in the control interface display of multi-million dollar jet fighter planes, it is integral to the computer games industry; it increasingly underpins all special effects in motion picture production; and it has provided content in an ideal form to distribute across a bandwidth poor networked environment.

Animation is an art form which can come from anywhere and which can go to anywhere - from a large production team working in a highly specialised studio or a lone individual working out of a bedroom, to an Imax Cinema screen several metres wide or a mobile phone screen a few centimetres across.

Animation can be as intimate and personal as a stick figure doodle jiggling in the corner of a dog-eared school exercise book cum flip book, or as expansive and public as animated laser lights splashed upon a cityscape (see Hong Kong's Harbour 'Symphony Of Lights' project - Lloyd Weir, Art Director, Laservision NSW and AIM graduate 1996).

Laservision's Hong Kong Harbour 'Symphony Of Lights' project. Art Director, AIM 1996 graduate, Lloyd Weir.

Animation has the capacity to: entertain, exaggerate, simplify, abstract, reveal complex processes, clarify difficult-to-understand concepts, visualise data, be a vehicle for humorous writing, sell product, be an art form, create slapstick sight gags, be a vehicle for insightful social comment, portray the human condition, and tackle difficult and uncomfortable subject manner.

'Hello' - a multi award winning animated film by 2003 AIM graduate, Jonathan Nix.

ANIMATION IS...

The amplification of an idea through simplification and abstraction; a sight gag timed to perfection; a visual poem; a moving painting; extraordinary sublime moments in the orchestration of moving image and sound; throw-away sick slapstick humour designed for the moment; stories that remain with you forever; time-based imagery that can be fantastically surreal because of its unique process of realisation; a journey through the human body and other datascapes; the invisible made visible; informative dynamic graphics that monitor critical processes; an animated neon sign. At its best, animation is an exquisite character performance synthesised at the end of a pencil, or increasingly through the sweep and click of a computer mouse, that would otherwise win an award for best acting.

Little else compares with the thrill of breathing life into characters that might never have existed but for your imagination, or to move a large audience of strangers to laugh out loud at their antics, or to keep a person interactively engaged with them and the worlds you have invented, for hours on end.Almost anything can be brought to life and be imbued with personality, twigs, clay, drawings, objects, computer meshes, and, of course, anything becomes possible in the world of animation. It can entertain, explain and fascinate. In all its wondrous forms from the traditional 'bonk 'em on the head' cartoon styles, to TV commercials, sophisticated narrative works and simulations, to experimental, digitally composited, special effects driven and art films, animation is a powerful vehicle for ideas.

Annemarie Szeleczky used sticks of macaroni and torn paper (left) and the Aussie breakfast spread, 'Vegiemite' for the experimental animation in her research project - "The Development of Experimental Animation Techniques Using Mixed Media, Spatial Layering and Gestural Artwork."

Whether expressed in linear, interactive or real-time forms, the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media embraces the broadest of definition of animation. Animation is timeless, nimble and future proof - and is currently, very 'hot'.

'Symbiosis' by AIM research candidate, Mark Guglielmetti. An immersive stereoscopic virtual space. Co-recipient of the ATOM award for "Outstanding Virtual Experience" 2002 for the immersive digital art installation.

Posing in Animation

Today I'd like to talk a bit about posing. I recently was given a great lecture on posing. I know for me, when it came to my learning process in animation, not enough emphasis was placed on posing. I mean, really drawing and figuring out your poses before even getting into the computer. Also really pushing your poses. I always get feedback saying push those poses further.

I always seem to contain my posing. It seems that the best way is to push too much...because then you can always dial it back some more.In my experience it is to push the pose, step back, look again,then push more. It's like when they say, "It's always better to be overdressed than under-dressed". Never go with your 1st pose, ask yourself, "Can I push it further?" In the lecture I received he discussed 3 Main Principles of Posing.

1. Staging of the Shot
2. Line of Action
3. Pose Design

As animators we are exposed to staging all the time. Before we were animators it was planned out for you to see in all of the films that you watch. If you stop on a frame of animation, you can really study the staging in a shot. Where the characters are placed in the scene also in relation to the objects or even other characters. Most things in a shot as you might notice in many great photos do not lie perfectly center but are slightly offset. Take a look at this still frame from Foghorn, you can see the staging set up clearly and direct. All of the action and staging leads the audience directly where they want you to look.

This is discussed in John K's Blog as he takes this shot and breaks it down frame by frame. John's Blog is a great resource for this as he seems to do this type of stuff alot. He examines different shots of classic animation all the time and breaks them down. Check it out.

Now the Line of Action in a character is one of the most important aspects of posing. How you pose the character I believe will determine how much smoother your animation will flow from one extreme to the next. I never realized it early on but having really strong poses can actually make your animation easier when you go from your blocking to splining. It will also help your animation read clearly. You can convey just about every emotion with your posing. It also ties in with your framing of the shot in that many elements of the shot will follow your line of action. Think...if your character was just a line...Would it be clear?

These are a few poses of Louie from the Jungle Book drawn by Milt Kahl. I saw this post on Michael Sporn's Splog. There are many frames from this animation, so check it out cause they are amazing examples of how you can get good weight and character through Line of Action. Next time that you see a great piece of animation I encourage you to pause it on a single frame that best describes it. Then frame by frame it from pose to pose and see how clear the animation really is. This is all made possible by these types of poses.

There are a few elements within Pose Design that were covered in the lecture I received that I would like to bring up. Simple vs Complex and Straight vs Curve. They run hand and hand but you will see it. It is mainly all about balance in the pose when you are constructing it. Ask yourself what it is that you are trying to say. What emotion are you try to sell? Then you can start with your line of action and in that line of action will fall your attitude. Here are a couple of examples...one from animation and one from real life.

The 1st example is a Glenn Keane drawing for the prince of Rapunzel.

If you look at the left side of the Prince then you see Simple and Curved. The right side is Complex and more Straight up and down. Same with the pic of the the kick boxer his left side is Complex and the other side is Simple. In any good pose you can find these. Please check out Glen's site The Art of Glen Keane. There is always great examples of posing on there.

There are so many examples of great posing out there so do your research. I have put together a few more resources for everybody. So really take the time and think about your posing it will make a world of difference in your animation.

The ones above are from a great site called The Animation Art of Bobby Pontillas that has plenty of great examples.

This one comes from a Pose Tutorial I found on Deviant Art pretty sweet. Deviant Art is also a great resource for good posing.