Acting for Animation vs. Live-Action:

• Actors feel implicitly and it expresses explicitly. Animators control the external to make it appear it comes from the internal.
• Live-action may be more spontaneous while animation is planned. Actors may ad-lib a line while animators must animate to a line exactly.
• Live-action acting is more subtle, natural, and realistic. Animation acting is large, iconic, and similar to stage performances like dance.

Choices:

When you first start animating you struggle with the process, the medium, and whatever software package you are using. Once you have a grip on that and you feel comfortable employing the principles of animation effectively it is all about choices. You must make acting choices that are easily read, novel, and have appeal

Good Acting (choices):

• Readable

  Obviously your viewer should be able to read what is happening on screen and your character must be able to communicate.

• Convincing

  This is a difficult thing to do in animation. You must make your character to appear to have an internal motivation externally.

• Appealing

  Animation is art. Part of this means that your acting choices must be visually interesting.

• Novel

  Although animated performances are exaggerated it is still paramount to avoid cliches. You want to produce unique innovative poses.

Acting Beat:

An acting beat is a small amount of time, 1/2 second, that equates to one thought. It is important to allow poses to breath. This produces a strong beat that mimics internal thought and also allows the audience time to read the pose.

at 1:30 you can see Golemn pause to show internal thought

Vocal Track:

If you work in film animation, 90% of your work will involve dialogue. This is both a blessing and a curse. It limits what you can do but it also really helps drive your performance.

Reference:

The best way to produce a strong novel performance is to act out your scenes yourself. A reference video will give you:

• Mechanics

  It is much easier to apply body mechanics to a character if you can see the real thing in front of you.

• Improvisation

  Everything in animation is very well planned out since by nature it is so methodical. If you act out your actions you have the opportunity to be spontaneous.

• Nuance

  It is very easy to miss some of the smaller motions that break up larger ones. A good example of nuance is watching someone sit down. You will notice that they don’t simply just sit down they will readjust.

• Novel

  Typically the first thought that pops into your head is the most generic cliched version. Your performance is more likely to be innovative if you actually perform it.

Phonemes:

When animating lip-sync, traditional hand-drawn & stop-motion animation, most often employs the use of phonemes. Phonemes are the mouth positions associated with the different sounds of human speech. You will notice watching any Saturday morning or Sunday night animated show that the characters have distinct mouth drawings for each sound.

Visimes:

Visimes are similar to phonemes except they are not tied to specific mouth shapes for specific sounds & text but rather just thinks about the actual lip position at a specific time. Visimes use a combination of shapes to illustrate sound. It is easier to breakdown dialogue in CG this way.

Lip-Sync Process:

Primary Targets

Jaw Open/Shut

You can look at this as a volume controller

This is the most important target. It is similar to using a sock puppet.

Wide/Narrow

Generally speaking this controls the pitch of the sound.

At its widest mouth makes an EE sound. At its most narrow you get OO.

Secondary Targets

Lips Up/Down

The combination of moving upper & lower lips helps give stronger consonants and vowels such as FF, BB, AR, etc.

Special Cases

There are a number of less used shapes that are necessary to support certain sounds and express emotion

Tertiary Shapes

Frown

Pucker/Purse

Lips Left/Right

Sneer

Etc.

Did you remember to?

• Read through this webpage
• Submit Rig & Animation Project on Blackboard