The animator as actor

Given these new contexts of changing animation practice, there is a body of literature emerging that countervails the more established discourses that championed exaggerated body language. These new discourses often draw relations between acting techniques and animation (Kennedy, 2013; Hooks, 2003) and are of significance within the context of my own exploration of more nuanced forms of expression.

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Animators and animation studios have been looking to acting skills for inspiration for many years, though there is a difficulty in making a simple translation between the two professions, in that the two skills are not directly interchangeable. Thomas and Johnson note how an actor must feel an emotion in the moment, enacting it, then moving onto the next moment whereas “the animator has to stop time while he captures the elusive moment, dissects it, recreates it, and gets it all down on paper” (Thomas and Johnston, 1981, p.502). Hooks goes further, explaining how an actor must remove emotional blocks in order to be in the moment, and to avoid indication or anticipation, while an animator lives by indication and anticipation. Hooks’s training for animators had to be modified, without the removal of emotional blocks. An

animator doesn’t need to know how to “cry on cue because, if she were to do that, she wouldn’t be able to see to animate” (Hooks 2003, p.x). By using method acting, the Stanislavski technique of thinking or recalling yourself into an emotion, an actor strives to feel that emotion, on the understanding that it will manifest in their body. An animator might do the same, and resort to a mirror to view themselves within their emotion, but they must still dissect and translate that emotion into the animation, physically drawing each quirk of lip or brow, or tweaking the shape of a facial muscle on a computer screen. The process is slowed down. What might be over in minutes or seconds for an actor must be laboured over for days by an animator.

Williams believes that the underlying emotion within an animator can taint an animation. Thus a happy animator will taint a sad scene with happiness, while a sad animator might darken a happy scene. He recommends teaming sad animator to sad scene, happy animator to happy scene where possible (2001, p.319), though a professional animator should be able to handle any scene regardless of what inner turmoil they might be facing. This concurs to some extent with my own experience of animating, but the converse can occur, with a sad scene lowering an otherwise happy mood and a happy scene raising your spirits. Hooks refers to Laban theory (see Chapter 2.4.4) and the need for animators to think of an attitude or emotion with the whole body, not just close ups of the face. For inexperienced animators, such as students I have taught lip-synch to, it can be hard enough thinking beyond the correct mouth movements for speech, let alone adding facial expression, and head movement, and whole body movement. As animators, we need to think and consciously move every part of the body. In the case of 3D computer animation, with rigged characters, this means thinking how an emotion or attitude

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will flow through every bone in the body, every bone in the rig, and of course, having awareness of the appropriate emotional behaviour for that particular point in the narrative. My own personal technique is to act out the action, not necessarily in front of a mirror, but instead trying to “feel” the attitude and weight in the pose within my own body. Hooks recommends filming oneself, as using a mirror is distracting. Half your attention is on acting the pose, and the other half is on watching it, not to mention that your body might be contorted in an unnatural manner in order to see into the mirror. In my own conversation with Paul Chung, supervising animator on Shrek the Third (2007) and Madagascar (2005) Chung also advised filming oneself acting out variations on a part as reference for animating, showing me clips of his own self-filmed

reference.

In most recent developments, motion capture technology has provided a bridge between the immediacy of acting and the freezing down of time of animating. In regard to motion capture techniques, Hayes and Derek describe the rise of a new form of acting, the “animated

performer” (Hayes and Webster, 2013, p.185) citing Andy Serkis as a prime example of this new breed. In his work for Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003), Serkis remarks on his experience working in the motion capture studio, and that having run through various different options for acting out a fight scene with a non-existent character (to be composited in from live action later) the simplest and least complicated rendition seemed the most convincing.

“when you’re telling a story frame by frame, the temptation is to animate a character to be busy all the time, but it’s often more powerful to do nothing. Watching the scene played back is like watching a silent movie where every emotion is carried in ‘pantomime’ – you really know if you’re told the story or not”

(Serkis, 2003, p.36).

Serkis seems to be implying that subtlety is needed, which raises the previously discussed suggestion that modern animation (intermingling seamlessly with live action in a 3D form) needs to be more sophisticated in its OEB.

Again, like the animators of Disney commenting on using photostats, Randall Cook, (animation design supervisor working with Serkis) comments on the importance of the

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animators not simply mimicking the motions of Serkis, but instead, trying to reach for the same understanding of Gollum that Serkis was reaching for, “an imitation of a famous person by an impressionist, no matter how much it sounds like him, is still just an impression, and often exaggerated and unreal” (Serkis, 2003, p.84). They were expected to use the live action footage of Serkis as reference, in order that the 40 odd animators working on Gollum would not result in 40 odd versions of Gollum, yet at the same time injecting their own spirit into the animation, not simply copying. The technology has moved on considerably since the early days of photostats at Disney, such that those early animators would not even recognize the complex technology involved, and yet we have come full circle, to the same fundamentals of animator working within and transfiguring through their art, live action footage via new technology.

“Live action could dominate the animator, or it could teach him. It could stifle the

imagination, or inspire great new ideas. It all depended on how the live action was conceived and shot and used.”

(Thomas and Johnston, 1981, p.319)

2.1.3 Conclusion

There are of course points where the basic mechanics of action are of more importance than acting per se. The photographs of Muybridge, taken roughly between 1875 and 1881 are still used as reference by animators today for walk cycles and animal gaits, an example of cutting edge technology of the time being used to provide information and reference for artists (Muybridge, 1984). Complex and skilled movements, such as the motion of named professional footballers within a football game (Silicon Dreams Studio, 2000) or specialist mechanics attending to a Formula 1 car in a game (SCE Studio Liverpool, 2005) are perfectly suited to the accuracy derived from motion capturing such professionals and specialists directly. However, outside of these specialist situations, the ability to express emotion has always been of importance to animators. Thomas and Johnson sum up the three key problems that animators face, in brief:

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2. Having the skill to execute it as an animation.

3. Capturing and articulating, often over many days, an emotion or attitude that an actor might express in minutes.

(Thomas and Johnston, 1981, p.502)

In the past, in traditional animation, this often involved exaggerated movements. A hand drawn character might have a very stylized face and body and could not express the subtleties of emotional behavior, being obliged to express the distilled essence of a movement. However, as technology creates increasingly more complex avatars, animators are now having to consider the more hidden aspects of OEB, to render characters that appear ever more human. It is the smaller, subtler movements and gestures that I hoped to explore in my research.

In this section I have explored the means by which animators (practitioners) understand they have to express bodily movement, their quest to render their animations convincing and compelling. The examination has discovered animation as being in part governed by

conventions of representation (and forms of coded communication), and part by an attempt to spurn symbols and capture “true” movement and gesture. An animator is free to use either method, though that freedom might be curtailed by lack of time and money, thus an animator must make decisions to combine or reject a method depending on the restraints imposed (studio style, manpower and skills available, lack of time). Ironically, it is often exaggeration and simplification that seem to make animation more “lively” (rooting an animation within a coherent imaginary “world”), though this effect is also at other times produced by an increase of subtle nuances which make animation less wooden or semaphored – so an animator in fact has to negotiate a path between these extremes.

What is “convincing” is very much dependent on different contexts, with the integration of live action and animation in cinema, for example, creating expectations that animation be

increasingly nuanced and naturalistic, fitting into the aesthetic world of the realist film, which is quite different from the expectations of a hand-drawn animation from the 1930s.

Within the context of my own artifact, I was also heavily restricted in time, resources, skills and limited to a single womanpower of one animator. Thus I have tried to process from this part of the literature review, a path of my own, drawn from the many different paths in the creation

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of my artifact, which I will describe in further detail (with reference to the rest of this literature review) across chapters 3 to 5.