Acting for Animators - My Notes

Acting for Animators Notes

(My notes on the book Acting for Animators by Ed Hooks)

Covers just his 7 essential Acting concepts

Seven essential acting concepts:

    1.  Thinking tends to lead to conclusions; emotion tends to lead to action.
        - Everything begins with the brain
        - people don't just move they move for reason
        - we think of things before the body does them
        - emotion is a result of the thinking you do with your brain
        - thinking and emotion is different. It's emotion that leads to action
        - a emotion leads to action, and emotion is an automatic value response based on thinking
        - we experience our emotions based on our personal values, we are all different but all of us
          have certain traits in common
   
    2.  Acting is reacting. Acting is doing.
        - all action is a reaction to something
        - acting is also doing. Reacting also includes reacting to internal thought
          ex - I'm thirsty or external event such as a fire alarm going off

    3. Your character needs to have an objective.
        - what is he doing? And what he's doing his action should be active in pursuit of objective
        - your character needs to be doing something 100% of the time
        - so action without a thought is impossible and an action without an objective is just a
          mechanical thing
        - the objective a character pursues informs the action
        - need to know the action then ask yourself what the characters objective is
        - acting is playing an action in pursuit of an objective while overcoming an obstacle

    4.  Your character should play an action until something happens to make him play a 
         different action.
        - Your character should always be doing something
        - action to action can be internal or external
        - beads or beats are used to explain the action.  Beads in a necklace example
        - you need to be playing an action all the time
   
    5.  All the action begins with movement.
        - Movement may be imperceptible at first - ex. Heartbeats and breathing
        - action without movement is impossible
        - and remember that movement is result of thinking

    6.  Empathy is the magic key. Audiences empathize with the emotion.
        - Empathy means feeling into
        - empathizing with the character we relate in a personal with how a character feels
        - the theatrical transaction is between actor and audience, and the glue that holds it all                
          together is emotion
        - humans empathize with emotion not thinking
        - the goal of an animator is to expose emotion through the illusion of movement on screen

    7.  A scene is a negotiation.
        - A scene requires an obstacle unless it is a pure connective or expository situation -  ex.   
          Getting from one place to another
        - you can think of a scene as a negotiation because negotiations inherently contain conflict
        - conflict is not negative
            three kinds of conflict:
                1. Conflict with himself
                2. Conflict with the other characters in a scene
                3. Conflict with the situation
        - conflict and obstacle are the same thing. They both lead to negotiation