Collaboration: Research - Acting for Animators; Interviews with Ed Hooks

Listening to some interviews with Ed Hooks, I made some notes below each video of some key things.

• The difference between actors and animators is, animators don’t work in the present moment like actors do. 

• Actors are told to stay away from acting in the mirror because for them it’s like being on the stage and in the audience at the same time and it’s an impossible thing. Animators use mirrors and video references, but they are too aware, they’re aware of the scene and the movements and of themselves, Hooks reckons it would be better to see Animators use their friends more than themselves to act and reference. 

• He talks about how in Frozen there is fault in their storytelling and acting, there’s confusion over who the protagonist is, is it the character we follow throughout the story, who has no development (Anna) or is it Elsa, the Queen who has gone through character development by the end of the story and without her there’d be no plot. 

• Another fault is the villain in the story - Hans, throughout the story there is no foreshadowing that he’s the antagonist. When Elsa freezes the town his face doesn’t falter considering something totally unplanned has potentially sabotaged his plans; plus we don’t get the reveal until the third act close to the end. 

• Humans learn survival skills indirectly through story telling.

• The most important rule of acting is emotion tends to lead to action, the audience empathise with a character. They see what the character is doing and with empathy look underneath the action and identify with the emotion, that is how you get an audience to care. 

• The actor is the character on the screen, the animator is not the actor, an animator learns to see the world through the eyes of the character. The actor is the personality of the character. 

• Theatrical reality is for telling a story so you only show the parts of reality that are essential for informing an audience, you compress time and space and it has structure. You need conflict and obstacle where regular reality doesn’t have that all the time. 

• Acting is… behaving believably in pretend circumstances for a theatrical purpose. 

• Shakespeare said the actor should hold a mirror up against nature, you need to see nature and understand all the connections thinking, emotions and physical actions. An animator and actor needs to see more - why are people doing what they’re doing. 

• Everyone is the hero in their own life - even villains, we all star in our own movie and think about how are we presenting ourselves to the world. 

• Power centres are where we move from, you can move a power centre around, the higher the power centre the quicker the rhythm - anxiety is high power centre, tight and uncertain feeling like you’re going to fly away. Confidence is a low power centre - manifests in relaxed, centred, grounded, weight. This stops characters moving the same way. 

• The Iron Giant is a good example of good acting in animation, original toy story, Coraline and Up (first hour or it, mainly Carl and Ellie). That’s an example of how acting has nothing to do with words. 

• Up violates the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ principle, paradise valley where they meet Doug the talking dog via his magic collar, the audience is not ready for that as it was not set up in the first act. Same with Walle - you’re in space and not prepared for all the fat people.