Ed's Newsletter - September 2002

THANKS TO BIOWARE!
Oh boy, we had a good time in Edmonton! The Acting for Animators workshop coincided with the city's famous theatre Fringe Festival and BioWare is physically located right in the middle of the action. We had class all day and stayed up half the night, and I still wasn't ready to depart when I had to head for the airport. Special thanks to Dave Hibbeln for making the whole thing happen. And high-fives to Dave's talented wife, Beth, who suggested a Greek dinner amisdst the belly dancers. Heh. <g>

QUESTION ABOUT ACADEMY AWARDS
I discovered a marvelous short (9 minutes or so) animation while in Germany last May. It is so good that I think it merits Academy Award consideration, but I don't know how to engineer the submission process. My understanding is that one must be invited to submit. If any of my readers can can offer guiidance, I'd appreciate it. I'd like to help this young animator. He's that talented. The piece is mostly 2-D, with a smattering of 3-D. Terrific acting, excellent story, moves me.

STILL WORKING ON THE DECEMBER TRIP ABROAD
I'll be in Sydney, Australia in early December and want to extend my trip westward after that engagement rather than returning immediately to Chicago. This presents a really excellent opportunity for Acting for Animators workshops in other Australian cities, in Asia and Europe. The transportation costs should work out to be considerably less than usual because it is all part of the same pro-rata trip. I'm up for one or two-day workshops. Your call.

CRAFT NOTES
CHANGING WANT TO NEED
Yesterday, I caught the first matinee screening ($6 instead of $9, I'm no fool!) of a new Italian comedy, "The Last Kiss". It got me to thinking how much animators can learn from the Italians, especially when it comes to converting want to need as an acting impulse.

It's dangerous of course to generalize about things or people, but I feel safe in saying that the Italians are just about the most theatrical people on earth. I love to travel in that country, and I'm always amused by the way they dress and seem to be on stage even if going to the market for some panini. Everything over there seems to be important, whether it is arguing politics or making love or eating. They don't just sing songs, they do opera! and this trait is on display in spades in "The Last Kiss". Most of the moments in the movie are what I call in my classes "adrenaline moments", i.e. moments the characters will remember when they turn eighty and look back on their lives. Maybe this was by design on the part of the director, but it seems also to be generic to the people of Italy.

In brief, "The Last Kiss", set in contemporary Rome, raises the question of what makes one happy. It opens with a young woman happily announcing her pregnancy at a family dinner with her parents and surprised live-in boyfriend. We soon discover that the parents have problems of their own. Mama is feeling lonely because she doesn't feel her husband is attentive enough any more, and she is determined to rejuvenate herself, maybe with an affair. The pregnant woman's boyfriend meanwhile is initially delighted with the idea of being a father, and then he starts worrying about what precisely that might entail. Like giving up being a bachelor for one thing. And so he sets out to enjoy one last kiss/fling, with a young hottie he meets at, ironically, a friend's wedding. That's all the plot I'm going to divulge because I don't want to ruin the movie for you, and I do think it is worth seeing. The larger point I want to make here is that the characters in this movie care. They care a lot! About everything! They're Italian!

When I teach that you can energize a character by converting want to need, I am thinking of increased urgency. Regardless of the action, your character will execute it with more thrust if it is motivated by need rather than want. (I'm wondering now if Tex Avery or Chuck Jones were Italian..?) Hogarth needs to protect the Giant in "The Iron Giant". It isn't an optional matter for him. When Wile E. Coyote makes his umpteenth attempt to bring the roadrunner home for dinner, he is obsessed, needing to get the bird. That is largely what makes the character work, in fact. If there were a lot of birds out there, Wile E. Coyote might opt to catch one of the slower ones, which is what the predators do on those Discovery Channel documentaries. But that wouldn't be funny. In his world, there is just one lovely beep-beeping roadrunner, and the coyote needs him badly.

It makes sense if you really think about it. In acting, thinking tends to lead to conclusions and emotion tends to lead to action. If you turn up the heat under the emotion, you are going to get a more enthusiastic action. Stage actors learn that it is in fact impossible to act more energetically because that would amount to playing a "result" - and yet "more energy!" is one of the most common directions they hear. The trick to playing more energetically is to simply "care more about the subject". If you care more about the subject, you will automatically act more energetically.

I've written in previous craft notes (May 2002) about Don Graham's lecture at Disney Studios on force vs. form. Converting want to need is part of the same fabric, so this might be a good time to go back and review those notes. Especially when creating computer animation, there is a great tendency toward animating form instead of force.

Okay, one more scene from "The Last Kiss". The pregnant young wife discovers that her live-in boyfriend may be fooling around, and she tries repeatedly to call him on his cell phone. Pay close attention to the moment he turns his phone back on and answers. All hell breaks loose. Just like in animation.