Ed's Newsletter - January 2003

THANKS FOR THE SUNNY AUSSIE WELCOME!
The folks down under could not have been nicer. From the moment I walked out of the airport in Sydney until I departed two weeks later, I received nothing but smiles and "G'day, Mate!" from the folks in Australia. The classes at Walt Disney Animation in Sydney were well attended thanks to the hard work of Rhian Ellis. And I want to once again thank Disney animator D.J.Nicke for his enthusiastic support. D.J. was the one that first picked up the ball and ran with it. For a guy who teaches acting to animators, a gig at Disney is like visiting Mecca, and I am damned grateful to have had the opportunity.

James Whitlam of Rising Sun Pictures organized an on-site class at his shop (Lovely new digs, guys!) as well as the public class in Sydney. Without his tireless work, this very-expensive trip would not have made any financial sense, so my landlord sends him mega-thanks. High-fives, James! You did a marvelous job!

John Eyley at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in Brisbane is one of the sweetest and most talented people you will ever want to meet. He and Trent Ellis, his partner in crime at Queensland Animators, organized the public class there. Thanks for the swell times, John. Can't wait to do it again.

And to all the Oz animators that took time to study with me, I send a salute from chilly Chicago. I hope we can do a reprise, maybe as soon as next year. I had an excellent time. Everybody please stay in touch, okay? And thanks for being part of my Australian adrenaline moment.

THANKS ALSO FOR THE WARM WELCOME IN SNOWY MONTREAL!
The gang at Artificial Mind and Movement did a one-day class with me just before I left for Australia. Had a terrific time and then scurried to the airport. Montreal is a very lovely city from the perspective of a taxi window, and I for sure want to come back for a closer look. Thanks to Marcel Achard for making this class happen. You did a heck of a power center exercise, my man.<g>

LOOKING FORWARD TO ANIMATION 2003 IN TEESSIDE ENGLAND!
I'll be in Teeside January 29, 30 and 31. Can't wait to see my good friends Siobhan Fenton (and the babe and Ian!), Shaun Featherstone, Chris Williams and the rest of the team of animation educators at the University of Teesside in the UK.

IF ANY COMPANIES OR SCHOOLS IN THE UK OR THEREABOUTS WANT TO ARRANGE A CLASS FOR THE FIRST WEEK OF FEBRUARY... now would be a good time to raise your hand.

THE DEMISE OF 2-D?
Why do so many people delight in proclaiming the end of 2-D animation? It's annoying, and it's not true. The latest doom-sayer is Kim Masters in the January issue of Esquire Magazine (p 45). Quoting some higher-up at DreamWorks on the quick financial collapse of "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron"", Masters concludes "traditional hand drawn animation seems a thing of the past." Maybe he hasn't seen Miyazki's "Spirited Away". It is possible to make a profit with 2-D animation. You just have to start with a good story. "Lilo and Stitch" is doing just fine, so I hear, and is cute as all get out. It's curious to me that Disney evidently hasn't yet figured a way to make money off of Miyzaki in the U.S., given that the grand master's movies do well overseas. I read somewhere that "Spirited Away" grossed $200 million before it opened in the U.S.! Hand drawn animation is not going away any more than oil painting is going away. True, a reasonable financial model needs to be worked out in order to give profit a fighting chance. "Spirt: Stallion of the Cimarron" reportedly cost $80 million to make, and then the studio spent $30 million to promote it. By my reckoning, they'll have to gross close to $500 million in order to turn a profit, and that is probably too much to expect.

DIGIPEN (DONKEY KONG U)
USA Today ran a nice piece recently on DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Take a look: http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2002-12-03-video_x.htm
DigiPen is the only accredited 4-year U.S. university to offer a degree in video game design. According to the article, they're getting 24,000 "requests for applications" each year, but the school manages to discourage and dissuade all but 500 of those people from applying. Too much math for the average bear. Most of the 24,000 have the mistaken idea that designing games involves lots of playing of games at school. There were only 36 graduates from the program last year, and they all got job offers. Sounds to me like DigiPen is doing something right.

CRAFT NOTES
THE ADRENALINE MOMENT REDUX

During the recent classes in Australia, I noticed that my explanation about "the adrenaline moment" was not always clear to everybody. Since this is such an important concept and tool, I thought it might be useful for me to use these craft notes to go over it one more time.

DEFINITION: AN ADRENALINE MOMENT IS A MOMENT THAT THE CHARACTER WILL REMEMBER WHEN HE OR SHE TURNS EIGHTY-FIVE AND LOOKS BACK ON HIS LIFE. IT IS, IN SHORT, A MOMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE.

Have you ever noticed that you tend to remember particular moments in your life more than others? You will always remember the first time you made love, for example, but you will have trouble remembering what you had for breakfast day before yesterday. You will remember everything about what you were doing on 9-11. You will remember the day you met your spouse. You will remember the day your first child was born.

Scientists have discovered that when something "important" (i.e. important to our survival as humans) happens to a person, her brain literally becomes bathed with adrenaline. Nature marks this moment and instructs that she remember it. The moment may be happy or sad, full of excitement or very quiet. None of that matters. All that matters is that the moment be important. The first time you saw your friend get eaten by a saber-tooth tiger, your brain was bathed with adrenaline and marked. That way, you would respond with fear the next time you saw one of those animals approaching. It was a survival mechanism.

I have extended this physiological concept into story telling and acting. I am convinced that effective story telling necessarily includes at least one adrenaline moment, and it may include many. "The Iron Giant" is chock full of them for instance. Darn near every scene is so important that the characters involved will remember it when they turn eighty-five. Hogarth will always remember the day he first met the Giant. Dean will always remember the day that Hogarth's squirrel ran up his pants leg in the diner. Everybody on earth will remember the day the Giant chose to fly into space to intercept the bomb.

An adrenaline moment doesn't have to be a big earth-shaking deal. In the famous Disney animation of Pluto getting the flypaper stuck on his nose, that is an adrenaline moment for the dog. It works theatrically because it is important to the dog and because the scene involves actions, obstacles and objectives. The world will not change because of the flypaper. The moment is comparatively insignificant when compared with world wars and such, but it is important to the dog, and that is all that matters. Pluto will never forget his encounter with the flypaper!

I saw an advertisement the other day for a bird-feeding contraption that will literally fling hungry squirrels off into the bushes. It is battery operated and is hysterically funny to look at. Squirrel climbs up to get some food and the whole thing starts spinning, with the squirrel hanging on for dear life. Well, we have the makings there of an adrenaline moment for the squirrel, if anybody decides to make an animation out of it. For sure the hapless squirrel will not forget the day he encountered the squirrel-flipper bird feeder.

An adrenaline moment is a factor of character. It is not a factor of story. The story per se does not have an adrenaline moment because the story's brain doesn't get bathed in adrenaline. The character's brain gets bathed with adrenaline. An adrenaline moment is also not something that happens to the audience. The audience does not experience an adrenaline moment unless the theatre burns down while the movie is screening. The person in the audience empathizes with the character that is experiencing an adrenaline moment.

In my Acting for Animators classes, I like to show Michael Dudok de Wit's award winning short animation "Father and Daughter". The story is about a young girl spending her life coming to terms with her father's death. The single adrenaline moment in the piece is the day the father dies. The movie has no other such moment, but that single moment powers the whole thing.

HOW TO USE THE ADRENALINE MOMENT CONCEPT
You can super-charge a scene if you make it into an adrenaline moment. Clearly, you don't want to do this for every single scene in a story. If a character is threading a needle for instance, that may very well not be an adrenaline moment. It would become one if, say, the needle got embedded in the person's finger and he had to go to the doctor to get it taken out. You would not want to arbitrarily make an adrenaline moment out of an average scene. But if you have a story that seems not to have any adrenaline moments in it, you may well want to re-assess the significance of your story. Why are you telling the story in the first place? What is important about it? Why does it matter?

If you are making your own animation, ask yourself if the story you are telling is worth calling the tribe together. Actors are shamans, and so are animators. When you tell a story, there needs to be some point to it. If you call the tribe to assemble, be sure that you have something worthwhile to say.

If you are assigned a scene to animate on the job, ask yourself if it is possible that this is an adrenaline moment for one of the characters. Check with the director. In my stage-acting classes, I will sometimes suggest to actors that they play an energy-less scene a second time, making it into an adrenaline moment. What this means is that they should make the scene important enough that the characters will remember it when they turn eighty-five. Most often, this is a very constructive adjustment.