Ed's Newsletter - August 2002

"THANK YOU, ELECTRONIC ARTS!"
You guys really did it right, and I appreciate it. I could not have asked for better hosts nor a more enthusiastic class of animators. It is a real special pleasure for me to work with a team like yours, no kidding. Special thanks to Kyle McKisic, this month's candidate for the Busiest Man Alive Award. Kyle is who made it happen, and I send him a cyber high-five and enthusiastic hug. Thanks to all!

LOOKING FORWARD TO BIOWARE ...
I'll be working with the animators at BioWare in Edmonton Canada August 17-18, and I really can't wait. I mentioned this gig to a teenage friend over a pizza yesterday, and he almost choked on his pepperoni. "You mean, like, 'Baldur's Gate'?! Cool!" You guys at BioWare are famous! See ya soon --

BRING "ACTING FOR ANIMATORS" TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD!
I will be in Sydney, Australia Dec. 1-4, participating in the Digital Media World Australian Effects & Animation Festival. After finishing up there, I plan to continue westward, circling the globe before returning to Chicago. If you or your company or your school would like to host a one or two-day "Acting for Animators" workshop, this would be an ideal time to do it, regardless of where you are located in the world. Normally when I teach internationally, the travel expenses are a big part of it. This time, that will not be the case because I can apportion it pro-rata. If you are interested in talking about this possibility, please contact me right away. My e-mail is edhooks@edhooks.com. I hope to see you soon!

ANIMATORS ARE DIFFERENT ...
Stage actors and animators approach and apply acting theory very differently from one another. A major difference is in the use of psychological visibility. For stage actors, it is absolutely essential; for animators it is totally irrelevant. In my August Ed Hooks Newsletter, which goes out via e-mail only to stage actors, I wrote on this subject in the craft notes. If you'd like to read it, drop me a note and I'll send it to you. Just keep in mind that I wrote it for stage actors, not animators.

CRAFT NOTES
"THE USE OF SYMBOLISM AND FORESHADOWING"

A person watching a live-action movie will presume that 100 percent of what is on the screen means something. If you have a scene that takes place in a shack in the wilderness, the fellow in the audience will take notice if you include, for example, a small purple wild flower sitting in a water glass on the counter. He won't know what to make of it, but he will file it away in his brain just in case this is information he may need later on in the story.

This tendency for an audience member to endow every single thing on screen with importance is potentially a valuable tool for animators of both movies and games. You can use it to foreshadow events, to expose character traits and to re-direct or mis-direct attention to plot.

This subject is on my mind today because an interesting article was recently published on the Gamasutra web site (http://www.gamasutra.com), having to do with the uses of symbols in video games. Its author David Freeman contends that game designers can deepen the emotional response of the game player by inserting non-obvious symbols here and there. He says that if the symbol is so obvious that the audience notices it consciously, then you have gone too far. His idea is to insert symbols that float and register just below the game player's conscious level. I think Freeman is on to something, but this is a very big subject. Before you start inserting symbols helter skelter in your animation and giving yourself high-fives for being a budding George Lucas, let's take it a step further.

The key to the use of symbols rests in the audience's inclination to endow absolutely everything on screen with importance. This is also the Achilles Heel of this tool, and it why you must tread carefully. On a certain level, just about everything is a symbol of some kind. Words themselves are symbols! I say, "cat", and you get an image in your mind, a symbol. I give an onscreen character a kitchen knife, and it may or not be an important symbol. It could be that he wants to cut himself a chunk of parmigiano reggiano, or it could be that he is contemplating mayhem. It all depends on the story being told and the kinds of characters you have established.

One of David Freeman's examples, for instance, is from the movie "Shawshank Redemption". The bad prison warden interrogates a new prisoner alone at night in the darkened prison yard. At the end of the meeting, the man walks away from the warden. As he does, the warden tosses his cigarette butt to the ground and steps on it. In the next moment, the prisoner is assassinated by a mysterious shot fired from the darkness somewhere. Freeman says the tossing of the cigarette butt is a symbol of the awful things in store for the prisoner and maybe also for Tim Robbins. Well, maybe, but I have another interpretation. It could be that tossing the butt to the ground was merely a signal for the hidden gunman to open fire. It could also be that the warden was simply through with his smoke and didn't want to burn his fingers. To me, the larger significance of the cigarette is the fact that the warden smokes in the first place. That suggests a certain kind of unfortunate and potentially dangerous personality trait. Also, the warden is the sort that doesn't mind littering the prison grounds with his cigarette butts. That, too, suggests a certain kind of personality trait, a status transaction. I don't imagine the warden picks up his own butts. The scene does indeed cause the audience to have a sense of foreboding about what the bad warden might do in the future, but to me, the symbolism that David Freeman wants to make of the cigarette is a bit of a stretch if taken by itself. This is what I mean when I say he is onto something, but that we need to be careful how we apply what he is suggesting.

The use of symbols and subliminal messaging is actually an old Madison Avenue trick that probably was borrowed from stage plays and religious ceremonies. You can easily grasp its modern dynamic application by studying politicians in election year. Notice how often they include the American flag in their public appearances. The flag is of course a powerful symbol. Position a shirt-sleeved President Bush in Yellowstone Park for a speech against the backdrop of Old Faithful, and he becomes an environmentalist symbolically. Photo-ops are all about symbolism, in fact.

Symbols in stage plays are ancient. Stage designers make use of them all the time. I'll wager I have personally appeared in dozens of plays that had either phallic symbols or images of the Cross scattered around in non-obvious ways. Years ago, I directed a Murray Schisgal stage comedy entitled "Luv" in summer stock. It amused me to always cause the men in the cast to cross to the lone woman in the cast, instead of her crossing to them. I was real proud of myself because I figured this kind of blocking sent a subliminal message to the audience about how men in Schisgal's world were subordinate to the women. I figured nobody in the audience would ever consciously notice what I had done and, indeed, nobody ever did. Looking back on the production from my current perspective, I still think the blocking choice was interesting, but I'm not so certain it carried the symbolic wallop I intended. It may have been too subtle by half.

Screenwriters routinely use symbolism and foreshadowing to advance the plot. Hamlet's father appears as a ghost early in the famous play to inform him of his murder. Hamlet is enraged maybe to the point of insanity and we in the audience are set up to expect the worse. The ultimate goal with foreshadowing is to project the climax. You want the audience, at the moment of climax, to be totally surprised by what happens and yet to recognize that it was utterly predictable all along. Foreshadowing and the use of symbols are how you achieve this hat trick. Remember in "The Sixth Sense" when the kid says early on, "I see dead people"? That's foreshadowing.

PRACTICAL APPLICATION FOR ANIMATORS

1) Symbols are fun, but the story is everything. Any symbolism or foreshadowing you use needs to be logical and consistent with the story. You can't take a lousy plot and fix it with symbols. In "The Iron Giant", the refrains about the giant wanting to be Superman become symbolic after a while. Superman is a symbol of goodness, power, and self-determination. When the Giant flies into space at the end of the movie, on a collision course with the bomb, the last thing we hear him say is, "Superman....". His destiny, foreshadowed earlier in the movie, has become reality.

2) Try to incorporate symbols into justifiable character behavior. Humans are wonderfully inconsistent at times, capable of multi-layers and seemingly contradictory behavior. Hamlet has within him the makings of a future king and also the seeds of insanity. His father's ghost sets him off. Hitler reportedly had a genuine affection for children. The temptation, especially with game designers, is to create characters that are very mission-oriented. (This was, to me, a major failing in the movie "Final Fantasy") Being mission-oriented is a good thing up to a point, but you can generate more emotional depth in your game player if you allow the characters to occasionally exhibit behavior that isn't in pursuit of a huge goal. Remember Marlon Brando's flower garden in the movie "The Godfather"? That garden, happy and frequently full of children, exposed a marvelous character element, it seems to me.

3) If you are in pursuit of an international audience, keep in mind that symbols are a cultural thing. An American flag means one thing in the U.S., but it may mean something else entirely in China. Michael Dudok de Wit uses a very universal symbol in his Academy Award winning animation "Father and Daughter". A bicycle is the same the world over. Keep an eye out for the most common denominator. This was, by the way, one of the great secrets of Charlie Chaplin's success. If you read his autobiography, you learn that he was very conceptual about trying to come up with character behavior that would resonate internationally. He was looking for what is true of all humans.