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MillimeterActing for Computer Animators: A Sense of Empathy Is More Useful Than Ever
Mar 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Ed Hooks
Walt Disney knew. Animated characters don't just move, they move for a reason. "The mind is the pilot," he explained in a famous memo to art teacher Don Graham. "We think of things before the body does them." And so, in 1932, Graham began to instruct the small band of Disney animators in the dynamics of movement and character motivation. His twice-a-week classes became part of Disney lore, and, in the opinion of many historians, were a major contributor to the studio's early feature-length successes. Under Graham's guidance, the animators refined an approach that would become known as the "Illusion of Life." Disney's animated characters would be funny-but they would also have heart.
Today's animator is more likely to arrive at the employment office tapping on a keyboard than carrying a sketch pad. He may not need to actually draw characters very often, but he must be able to manipulate them on the screen. One shouldn't put too fine a point on it, but it is accurate to say that the computer animator flexes a different set of muscles than the traditional animator. Pixar Animation Studios lists "acting ability" as the number two talent the company values in its animators, behind "storytelling ability." Ability to draw is, for Pixar at least, number five on the list, while it was number one on Walt Disney's 1932 list of preferences.
Animators need to know a lot about acting, but they don't need to know everything about it. They don't need to know, for example, how to make themselves cry on cue, which is something that actors must do from time to time. If an animator starts crying at his desk, he won't be able to see to animate. He needs to learn some basics about acting, among them: (1) Acting is doing. (2) "Anticipation," in acting terms, is a bad thing. (3) Emotion is the result of thinking, as is movement. He needs to learn that a scene is in fact a negotiation, and that there is an arc to every emotion and movement. He should be familiar with status transactions. (Read Keith Johnstone's book Impro). But he does not need to do the kind of classroom emotional work that actors do, searching for emotional triggers, sense memories and the like.
Animators are routinely encouraged by their instructors, directors and producers to read books on acting and to enroll in acting classes. That's fine advice, except that professional-level acting classes are generally oriented to actors, not animators. That means that an animator who strolls into such a class must decipher for himself which part of the training is appropriate and necessary. If the teacher isn't sensitive to the particular needs of animators, the learning experience may be frustrating for all parties concerned.
Acting classes are actually a recent development in history, dating back only to Constantin Stanislavski's workshops at the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia. It was Stanislavski, under the influence of Freud and Pavlov, who fathered naturalistic, psychologically-based acting techniques. Before that, the craft of acting was learned mainly through a process of apprenticeship. An aspiring actor would present himself at the theater door and ask for the opportunity to learn by doing. He would pull curtains, move props, carry spears in crowd scenes, paint flats and generally sit at the master's knee, soaking up accumulated theatrical wisdom. When formal acting classes later took hold in the U.S. and England, the teachers were dependent on this same initiative on the part of the student actor.
I was hired in 1996 to teach acting to the character animators at Pacific Data Images in Palo Alto, California, a company that was in pre-production for its first full-length animated feature, Ants. I had taught acting to professional actors for 25 years but never to animators, and so the work presented me with a steep learning curve of my own. I quickly discovered that not all animators liked to get up and act in scenes or do improvisations. To be sure, there were a few in that group who displayed a genuine flair for performing and could probably carve out a second career on stage if they ever get the itch, but it was readily apparent that if I was to involve everyone in the class, I would have to find new approaches. One could not teach computeranimators the way one teaches professional actors. To the credit of the PDI creative team, I was invited to experiment.
The work at PDI gradually evolved into a combination of group-participation improvisations, lectures on acting and analysis of live-action films. Keeping in mind that the search for empathy is the most important thing to actors, we studied Charlie Chaplin's work just as if The Gold Rush and Modern Times had been produced last year instead of 70 years ago. We discussed acting principles in depth and at length, exploring what Artonin Artaud meant when he said that "actors are warriors of the heart." And we talked a lot about comedy.
In one memorable session, we screened a clip from the movie The Miracle Worker in which Annie Sullivan (Ann Bancroft) teaches a young Helen Keller (Patty Duke) to eat her food with a utensil and not with her fingers. Helen, blind and deaf since birth, resists the effort to the point of pain, and Annie keeps returning to first base, forcing the spoon back into Annie's hand. Food is thrown all over the room, chairs are toppled, skin is bruised and torn as the characters do battle worthy of Greek titans. Finally, after seven full minutes (!) of non-stop action, Helen Keller takes her first bite of food with a spoon. It is an intensely satisfying cinematic moment, one any audience can empathize with, and it presented some terrific object lessons for the PDI animators. First, it demonstrated how an audience's attention can be held by physical action alone. Second, it confirmed the connection between thought and action. The intentions of the characters in the scene are clear and are expressed physically.
To properly train the growing ranks of computer animators, acting teachers will have to do things differently from how they did in the old days. Acting for computer animators will have to be a sort of plug-in application. The focus and purpose of the training needs to shift from drawing skills to acting skills, and the animators must be engaged on an empathetic level. The teacher must show the animators what good acting looks like and then make sure they understand how the impulses are being played out by the professional actors themselves. It's a spin on the old show biz adage: "Tell them what they're going to see; show it to them; then tell them what they saw." In the case of animators, we must "tell them what they are going to feel; let them feel it; tell them what they felt." Walt and Don would understand.
Ed Hooks is an acting teacher who has taught acting to the animators at Pacific Data Images in Palo Alto, California. His e-mail address is edhooks@best.com. His URL is: www.best.com/~edhooks.
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