Once you really get your mind in the character in that way, then you should be free to come up with any other unique flavors you can add to the mix, which will first and foremost help to specifically communicate what the character should be doing in that scene, but also maybe help the character feel that much more believable and alive in their world. *Spoiler Alert* Here is a recent, simple example. In Up, there’s a scene with young Ellie showing young Carl her Adventure Book, and she does this little thing during a moment of pause, of touching her thumb against her teeth before moving on to the next page or whatever. I don’t know, but to me, there was someth ing amazing about that! It was such a simple, unique choice, but made her feel so much more alive in that world. Was it already in the storyboards? Or did the animator (Guillerme Jacinto) notice a little kid or someone do that before and put that into his animation? Did he do that himself once, or in a reference take? Or did he really get into the head of this character at this moment in her life and imagine “I know her. That’s probably something she would do...” I don’t know the exact answer (I’ll have to ask him now!), but for me, that kind of little unique choice is amazing and really helps make that character so much more believable! Whatever the reason, he came up with the choice that young Ellie would have done something like that in her present situation, so he went with it, and it delivered!
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As for characters that have never been animated before – for me, now that’s the real fun stuff! Because now, you have an opportunity to help define that character. You can begin to infuse all those little traits and all those little bits that make up their personality. More often than not, you’ll have a director who already has a well developed idea of what the character should be and how they should act/react to situations at hand, but how they do it – sometimes that is entirely up to you! When you hear directors in interviews give advice to animation students about what they should do to get into the animation business and you often hear an answer something like, “You need to experience life and bring those experiences into your animation.” I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ve heard Brad Bird say this in a number of interviews. So for a situation I just described where a character is somewhat of a “blank slate” in terms of their personality or how should they move and act, here is where you can have the best opportunity to bring in a bit of yourself, your experiences, little behaviors you’ve noticed in people while sitting on the bus and watching them – whatever! This is the opportunity to tap into all those things you’ve been accumulating over your lifetime and who knows, maybe help define a character with those traits that are unique to your experience.
In all this exploration of acting choices and getting into the mind of the character, whatever choices you come up with must fit within the needs of the shot/scene. For instance, you may come up with this really clever and unique acting choice which cracks up everyone in the room, but if that’s not the objective of the shot, it’s no good. In other words, maybe the audience should be paying attention to the main character, but this unique acting choice by the guy on screen right is drawing everyone’s eye away from the main character. This is a failure because it’s detrimental to the objective of the shot. So in that case, it is not a good choice. And as hard as it may sound, a good animator has to accept that, recognize why, and be willing to do what is best for the shot by taking out that really funny and unique acting choice. Maybe it’ll work somewhere else another day, maybe not... So getting the most inspired performances in your characters, I think, means achieving that right balance of good, unique ac ting choices and fulfilling the needs of the shot. When you’ve done these things in a way that brings more out of the character than the director and everyone else initially thought was possible – making them and the world more believable – then I think you’ve created an inspired animated performance. But it’s tough, and you can’t win them all. Some amazing animators seem to give performances like this on a regular basis, while others maybe once in a blue moon. Frank Thomas said that he felt he had only created maybe five great shots or performances in his career. Wow, right?! Of course, the standards he set for himself were probably very high, but he definitely knew what he was going for and what he recognized as a truly inspired and successful performance. Wherever that truth may lie, working hard towards those truly great performances is definitely key as an animator.
MY PROCESS, MY W O R KFL O W Planning
It really can’t be emphasized enough. There’s nothing that makes a shot more difficult and unnecessarily devours more time than not planning the shot well from the beginning. So I usually both draw thumbnails and shoot reference. Sometimes each of these gives me ideas that I hadn’t originally thought of. For instance, first, I like to draw thumbnails to try and find interesting poses. To try and come up with poses and layouts that are graphically clear to read (good silhouettes) and that hopefully direct the viewer’s eye throughout the frame to where they should be looking. It’s also a way to quickly try out different ideas – hopefully being able to whittle down to that best pose. Also, when I draw, I tend to get very focused on what I’m doing and it really helps me personally to be able to visualize in my mind how the entire shot should work. It’s invaluable time I can give myself to really think about everything in the shot. Then I usually shoot reference. I don’t spend a lot of time shooting reference. It’s more of a tool to validate or eliminate my earlier ideas in thumbnailing, and hopefully, during the process of acting things out, I’ll find some unique ideas that I hadn’t considered before. Sometimes, I find much better poses in the reference I shoot – either more communicative, simpler, or maybe just more appealing. So in those cases, I go through that reference and thumbnail out those poses and go from there. On really close-up subtle shots of the face, I spend more time shooting reference because it’s much easier to find those little nuances in your performance, mostly in the eyes and the brows.
As for any other types of reference – looking at actors in movies that might be similar to the type of performance you’re working on, real-world physics, etc. – absolutely! If you have a character that’s supposed to act a certain way and you remember something similar from an episode of The Honeymooners with the Jackie Gleason, most definitely look at those sources. If nothing else, look at them for inspiration and maybe some other ideas. You probably wouldn’t want to try and mimic what the actor is doing, because again, your character is in their own world and most likely, quite a different situation from the one you’re referencing in some movie. But definitely go there for ideas. Also, watching a lot of movies and different actors will almost certainly expand your film vocabulary and fill your knowledge database of what separates good acting from bad acting, and what you may want to reference in the future. An animator is an actor, so the more you study film and acting, the better an actor you’ll become. On Pixar’s Partly Cloudy, I was helping to try and come up with the ways the cloud character would need to move in order to feel like a cloud, yet still be able to move adequately for the performance that was needed. In some instances, the main cloud Gus needed to move fast, but if he moved too fast or too “traditionally” like the way we are used to animating characters, he didn’t feel like a cloud. So one thing I used for reference was a lava lamp. Its not a cloud, but it does have that same nebulous quality I had in mind – where you have a lot of squash and stretch, but also where certain elements, once in motion at a certain speed and rotation, continue on in that same trajectory until they are obstructed in some way. So I applied the same idea to Gus’s body parts. If he was hunched over and straightened up, his torso and even his head might continue to move in that same direction, same rate, same rotation, until Gus moved in a different way, altering that trajectory. Same thing with his arms. If he moved his arm up, it would very nebulously continue on that same path, same speed, same rotation, until it either stretched to his limit and then began squashing back to original form, or until he consciously moved it in a different way. And any time he came to “rest,” those body parts that were in motion would continue on in their previous trajectories. So I got a lot of those ideas from just studying that lava lamp.
I SPEND MORE TIME SHOOTING REFERENCE BECAUSE IT’S MUCH EASIER TO FIND THOSE LITTLE NUANCES IN YOUR PERFORMANCE, MOSTLY IN THE EYES AND THE BROWS.
MATT STRANGIO
Well, that’s really up to the director and up to you as the actor. There should be obvious guidelines to certain characters, especially if they are already known and have well developed personalities already. But within that realm, you as the actor need to put yourself in the point of view of that character, at that specific point in their life. You need to know their general personality, but everything should depend on the situation that they’re currently in.
ACTI NG CHOI CES VS. PERFORMANCE
Not all shots allow for those kinds of moments, but that should never keep you from really trying to think in those terms and explore those ideas. And of course, if the shot calls for a somewhat “standard delivery” of a performance, you’ll always have the fallback of your leads, your fellow animators, and the director, to help steer you on the correct course to really make choices that are consistent with the character.
ANIMATION INSIDERS /
AC TI N G C H O I C E S
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