Here are my notes (so forgive the somewhat "notey" format) that I follow on what it takes to get into acting out a shot. First, just want to give a shout out to my AM mentor Mike Stern, Dreamworks Animator, to really laying down a great foundation and opening up the sky when it comes to approaching my shot. I hope this guides you as it has done for me.
Acting is instinctual, you know when its good. Focus on the essentials we want to be clear, honest, sincere, and simple. The audience is watching and wants to be entertained! That's are job!
Yes acting should be instinctual, we can start here and really dig in and root out what you can define as the truest response. But what if our actor is so different that we cant relate to its frame of mind and/or its physical body? ie a talking dragon with eight heads. Hmm, ok know we go to our imagination and shear away from our natural instincts. Easy enough, but how do we do that? Tools, or rather exercises that will help us get to where we can design our performance. Where an actor might take info and portray it through or on themselves, our jobs as animators, is to imagine info and portray it on another object - our character. We want to as I was taught, "tell the truth under imaginary circumstances."
First, we might want to recall emotion from memory, essentially method acting. Here we want to feel the moment. A good practice to learn is to take a single word from your dialogue and adjust your emotions with each delivery of the word. The idea here is to elicit certain responses and try and change the scene entirely. We could use improv and with improv we might want to look for important moments where status - the idea that an actor has control of one or many characters, can authenticate your shot or maybe look to power centers where leading with certain body parts donates one's opinion of oneself. A good rule of thumb is that with status the actor controlling the scene tends to be less animated and more in control of his/her actions. And with power center examples we could lead from the belly - sloth and lazy. Lead from the chest - high opinion on one self. How far our chin is from our chest can equate a sense of confidence, so the larger the space between chest and chin the greater the confidence. We could just hardwire the physical look of what we think "looks" correct. Forget the emotion and what's inside just give me the "correct" look for angry! This style is assoc. with David Mamet - Actor's are just tools " if they are doing this, then this is the emotion I want." Now that we have an idea on what it takes to get into our actors heads, we'll go into workflow.
My Workflow
1. Once you have the line, play it over and over again. Learn it inside and out, front to back and back to front - burn it into your brain. You want to know every little part of that dialogue.
2. Now grab your camera and get ready to film yourself. We want to act out our first inspiration - Are our first ideas cliche? Just keep this in your thoughts. Now, we will film as much as you can think of about the shot. Don't worry about getting it "right" we want to see as many possible ideas as possible so get dirty. We want to be loose and remember to go with your instincts. We are trying to find those gems where we get as "true" as possible to each phrase( a phrase is a single thought or emotion to define your beats usually defined by verbs and sometimes nouns).
3. Ok, now watch your all your reference and go through and pick out frames and or frame #s of what you think is working. We want to really look for those choices that are resonating and yet again most true to our scene.
4. Analyze the shot, know the context of the shot, whats the lead up to our scene? What are the actor/actor's thinking, whats the emotion I'm going for here?
5. Phrase out your scene. Remember phrase is a single thought or emotion. A change in thought means a change in pose. There are two causes to relate change internal and external. Good to really show contrast in phrasing happy to angry, excited to bored, etc. So think of that verb that best describes the beats of your dialogue and make those your phrases. Also, good to know that some scenes will have no phrase change, it could be just 1 phrase. But in general we want dialogue lines where there is a strong change of emotion.
6. Now take all your reference picks of what you think is working and edit it to 1 take. You can do this inside of QT, but I find it easy to do this in After Effects. What this gives us is a full take of our shot, so we get a really good idea of any of the body mechanics, transitions, etc. Along with this take we will still reference our individual picks because this gives us a huge source of info when it comes to the emotions and spontaneity. So we get the best of both worlds!
Remember we are animators, not rotoscopers! We want the essence of our reference to support our animation. So amp up the appeal!!! Also, make sure to push your reference further, weak poses will kill your shot.
Understand context!!! Know that a story is like a good song and cannot evolve on just chorus after chorus after chorus. We need those quiets before the loud.
Top things to remember while acting out your shot:
1. EXPLORATION.
2. ANALYZE Ask questions to really define the character and his world.
3. PHRASING define your beats from 1 frame to the next.
4. CONTEXT.
5. PERSONALITY the more your personality shows the better.
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