Acting for
(Computer) Animators

Today's animator is more likely to arrive at the employment office tapping on a keyboard than carrying a sketch pad. He may not need to actually draw characters very often, but he must be able to manipulate them on the screen. We shouldn't put too fine a point on it, but it is accurate to say that the computer animator flexes a different set of muscles than the traditional animator. Pixar Animation Studios lists "acting ability" as the number two talent the company values in its animators, behind "story telling ability." Ability to draw is, for Pixar at least, number five on the list, while it was number one on Walt Disney's 1932 list of preferences.

An animator needs to know a lot about acting, but he doesn't need to know everything about it. He doesn't need to know, for example, how to make himself cry on cue, which is something that actors must do from time to time. If an animator starts crying at his desk, he won't be able to see to animate. He needs to learn some basics about acting, among them:

(1) Acting is doing.

(2) "Anticipation", in acting terms, is a bad thing.

(3) Emotion is the result of thinking, as is movement.

He needs to learn that a scene is in fact a negotiation and that there is an arc to every emotion and movement. He should be familiar with status transactions. (Read Keith Johnstone's book, Impro.) But he does not need to do the kind of classroom emotional work that actors do, searching for emotional triggers, sense memories and the like.

Animators are frequently encouraged by their instructors, directors and producers to read books on acting and to enroll in acting classes. That's fine advice, except that professional-level acting classes are generally oriented to actors, not animators. That means that an animator who strolls into such a class must decipher for himself which part of the training is appropriate and necessary. If the teacher isn't sensitive to the particular needs of animators, the learning experience may be frustrating for all parties concerned.

Acting classes are a historically recent development, dating back only to 1897 when Constantin Stanislavski began his workshops at the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia. It was Stanislavski, under the influence of Freud and Pavlov, who fathered the naturalistic, psychologically-based acting techniques actors use today. Before the invention of those formal classes, acting looked a lot different and was learned mainly through a process of apprenticeship. The aspiring actor would attach himself to a theatre company, pulling curtains, moving props, carrying spears in crowd scenes and generally sitting at the master's knee. Acting teachers, from the start, have been dependent on this same self-starting initiative on the part of the student actor.

I was hired in 1996 to teach acting to the character animators at Pacific Data Images in Palo Alto, California, a cutting-edge animation powerhouse that was in pre-production for its first full-length animated feature, "Ants", for DreamWorks. During my first meeting with the lead animators and Training Department execs in PDI's red brick hushed, high-security building, I explained that though I had taught acting to professional actors for twenty-five years, I had never focused exclusively on animators and would therefore face a learning curve of my own. To the credit of the PDI creative team, I was invited to experiment, and we soon commenced weekly classes in PDI's large carpeted conference room.

I quickly discovered that not all of the animators in that first group liked to get up and act in scenes from plays the way aspiring actors do. To be sure, there were a few who displayed a genuine flair and initiative for performing and could probably carve out a second career on Broadway, but it was readily apparent that if I were to involve everyone in the class on an empathetic level, I would have to find new approaches. One could not teach acting to computer animators the way one teaches acting to professional actors.

The classes at PDI evolved into group-participation improvisations, lectures on acting and analyses of various live action films. Woody Allen was already under contract to star in "Ants", so there was keen interest among the animators to analyze his particular brand of humor. We screened several of Allen's films, and I contrasted his comic persona with that of another genius, Charlie Chaplin. Whereas Woody is the ultimate pessimist, Charlie was the ultimate optimist. To understand one is to understand the other. We studied Chaplin's masterpieces just as if "The Gold Rush" and "Modern Times" had been produced last year instead of seventy years ago, mining them for principles of comedy and points of empathy. We discussed the art of acting in depth and at length, exploring what Artonin Artaud meant when he said that "actors are warriors of the heart." And some of the animators were inspired enough to accept scene assignments, rehearse on their own time outside of class and present scenes in class!

In one memorable session, we screened a clip from the movie "The Miracle Worker." Annie Sullivan (Ann Bancroft) teaches a young Helen Keller (Patty Duke) to eat her food with a utensil and not with her fingers. Helen, blind and deaf since birth, resists the effort to the point of pain, and Annie keeps returning to first base, forcing the spoon back into Helen's hand. Food is thrown all over the room, chairs are toppled, skin is bruised and torn as the characters do battle worthy of Greek titans. Finally, after seven full minutes (!) of non-stop action, Helen Keller takes her first bite of food with a spoon. It is an intensely satisfying cinematic moment, one any audience can empathize with, and it presented some terrific object lessons for the PDI animators. First, it demonstrated how an audience's attention can be held by physical action alone. Second, it confirmed the connection between thought and action. The intentions of the characters in the scene are clear and are expressed physically.

My work with PDI's animators ended when full production on "Ants" began, and I won't know until the first screenings how they applied the acting lessons. For my part, however, I was transformed by the experience. Teaching acting to animators is, in many ways, even more satisfying than teaching it to actors because what animators do is closer to magic. An actor is halfway interesting just because he is a person and he walks into the room; animators, by contrast, have to create the illusion of life out of nothing at all -- a blank page or computer screen. As CGI technology evolves, acting training for animators will necessarily become part of the basic curriculum -- on site and in schools. Animators must be engaged by their instructors on an empathetic and active level. Walt and Don would understand.