Ed's Newsletter - February 2003

ANIMEX 2003 (http://animex.tees.ac.uk/) IN TEESSIDE ENGLAND WAS GREAT FUN! What a fabulous time we had! Jason Schleifer from WETA Digital gave an excellent tutorial on the development of the character Gollum in "Two Towers". Nancy Cartright, the effervescent voice of Bart Simpson, delighted a sold-out house with her remarkable talents. (My personal favorite of her many voices is the naked mole rat. Heh....) Rachelle Lewis from Klasky-Csupo told us about "Rugrats", "The Wild Thornberries" and the many other projects from that prolific house. Joel Friesch, a visual effects supervisor at Tippett Studio, laid out the evolution of those funny Blockbuster Video Carl & Ray commercials. And on and on it went, one stellar talent after the next. Thanks so much to Chris Williams and Shaun Featherstone of Teesside University for including me in the festivities. You guys did a bang-up job!

CHICAGO ACTING FOR ANIMATORS WORKSHOP - MARCH 22ND
I will teach a one-day Acting for Animators workshop in my Chicago studio on Saturday March 22nd. 10am-5pm. $125 for the day. A good time will be had by all! To enroll, drop me a line at edhooks@edhooks.com.

ED HOOKS/ACTING FOR ANIMATORS IS COMING TO MALAYSIA! I'll teach some classes in Kuala Lampur the last week of April. Details are still forming, so stay tuned. Drop me an e-mail if you are interested. edhooks@edhooks.com.

A GUY IN LONDON IS LOOKING FOR AN ANIMATOR....A London musician named Noors is looking for an animator to work with him on an animated hip-hop music video he's developing. He has a few hundred dollars for the animator, but it doesn't sound to me like this is something you do for the money. He has in mind putting together a video, based on his original music, for presentation to record companies. If interested, drop him a note at zorntan@yahoo.com.

GOOD BOOK! "The Art of Layout and Storyboarding" by Mark T. Byrne is comprehensive and readable simultaneously, a neat hat trick. Mark, formerly a layout artist for Don Bluth Animation Studios in Ireland, today heads the Computer Animation Department of Ballyfermot College of Further Education in Ireland. His self-published book is densely illustrated, authoritative and deft. Very good stuff. Here's his web site if you want to have a look-see and maybe order a copy: http://www.artoflayout.com/

JOHN CANEMAKER'S DVD "MARCHING TO A DIFFERENT TOON"...
John sent me a review copy of his DVD, and it is funny, touching and marvelous! Canemaker, as you probably know, runs the animation program at NYU Tisch School of Arts and is a respected scholar of animation history. It turns out that he is also an extraordinarily clever and sensitive animator. No less a legend than Chuck Jones had this to say about his work: "To express admiration and affection for the multi-talented Mr. John Canemaker is, and must be, multi-layered, too: he is a writer, artist, historian, teacher, and biographer of the good and the great in animation; and he is, surprisingly and uniquely, an animator in his own right. John is an artist for all seasons and all reasons and it is a pleasure to so announce to the world." If you'd like to add John's DVD to your personal collection, here is the way to do it: VHS/DVD $29.95 To Order by Phone: To place an order by phone, please call 800.603.1104. Outside of the United States, please call 201-767-3117. To order by E-mail, contact MileFilms@aol.com.

CRAFT NOTES
"Why Animate It?"

Finally, I know the answer to that oft posed question, "Why animate something if you can shoot it live action?" Answer: Gollum. This character in "The Lord of the Rings - Two Towers" is a historical watermark of sorts. Gollum's essential personality was created by a live actor named Andy Serkis, but he was realized and given life by a team of animators at Weta Digital. It is a remarkable achievement.

Could Gollum have been shot live action? Sure, I think so. Director Peter Jackson could have cast an athletic and diminutive actor (someone from Cirque du Soleil perhaps?)and put him in a rubber body suit. But Jackson chose the more creative and far more difficult path of creating a CG character that must play full tilt scenes of emotional depth opposite actual live actors. The interface between CG and live-action became crucial. If the animators had gotten that wrong, the whole enterprise would have flopped.

Based on interviews I have read with the various parties involved - and based on Jason Schleifer's presentation at Animex in England, I understand the evolution of the character to go like this:

Peter Jackson purposely cast a creative and experienced actor and then stood back, giving him a lot of reign to develop the character of Gollum. Andy Serkis was brought into the process as a full tilt collaborator. This is vastly different from what happens in most animated features, when actors are hired to do the voices. Utilizing mo-cap, rotoscope, creature modeling plus a box full of CG digital tricks, the Weta animators took what Serkis brought to the party and caused Gollum to digitally appear on screen. Serkis's voice was computer enhanced so as to accentuate that strained raspy quality, and voila! A CG Gollum that is in fact a kind of hybrid.

When I watched the movie on a recent Saturday at a Chicago multiplex, I was particularly astonished by the way the animated Gollum interfaced so precisely and physically with the live actors. Those early wrestling and tumbling scenes are jaw-dropping wonderful. They accomplished this by having Serkis do the wrestling and tumbling and then digitally replacing his image with that of Gollum on frame by frame basis. Good grief! Talk about trying to build Rome in a day!

I have of course seen other movies that had interface between animated characters and live actors. In something like "Roger Rabbit" or "Stuart Little" however, the animated character is clearly a cartoon and so the audience itself mentally connects the dots of the interface. And there are some examples in which the animated character is a creature. Again, the audience's brain will do a lot of the work. In Gollum's case, the character appears photo-real and mostly human. The aesthetics are not the same. With photo-real human-animation, the audience suspends its disbelief in a different way than it does when it is watching cartoons or CGI creatures. In the case of Gollum, the audience had to accept the character's basic reality as a condition for empathy with his emotions.

Gollum's facial expressions are an animation how-to book in themselves. I am told that the Weta animators studied Paul Ekman's work while they were creating the facial expressions. Ekman, as anybody who has taken my class knows, is the San Francisco based psychologist/sociologist genius who does all that wonderful research on the expression of emotion in the human face. Take a look at his web site, http://paulekman.com/. Ekman has a new book coming out in April, by the way, with over one hundred photographs in it. You can pre-order it, as I already have, at Amazon.com. He also told me in a recent e-mail that, in late April, there will be two CD-ROM's available for the study of facial emotion. These will be sold through a dedicated web site that has not been built yet. Stay tuned. I'll write about it here when it happens.

From an acting perspective, Serkis is obviously immensely talented. He plays scenes not only with other actors but also with different aspects of his own self. He uses the psychological gesture quite often. I teach about psychological gesture in my workshops, always with the understanding that it is a difficult concept to apply. Because of the way Gollum was developed, this character - via Serkis - makes much use of this device. If you are looking for psychological gestures, keep an eye on Gollum's oversized and expressive hands. They seem to have emotion of their own. Also, watch how Gollum (Serkis) uses status transactions all the time, to negotiate for what he wants or needs. He will frequently toss his power center into the ground in a counterfeit subservient fashion.

There is a move afoot to nominate Andy Serkis for an Academy Award, but that's a non-starter. The Academy will never know what to do with a situation like this in which an actor acts, but his performance is delivered by animators. Many of the Academy voters will feel artistically threatened by this development in fact. It will give them a headache. It doesn't matter. The cat is out of the bag, and the horse is out of the barn. Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis and a bunch of supremely talented animators at Weta Digital have done this before anybody else has. If the overall entertainment industry doesn't applaud loudly enough, then the animation community can make up the difference.

Is Gollum animation? Yes, sort of. Is Gollum live-action? Yes, sort of. The character is a hybrid, a nexus of two different artistic disciplines. He is both. And he is historic.