Ed's Newsletter - June 2002

ACTING FOR ANIMATORS IN DALLAS
I'll be teaching a one-day class in Dallas June 29th. This is open to all animators. For info, contact Vince Sidwell at vsidwell@flash.net.

VANCOUVER ACTING FOR ANIMATORS JUNE 22-23
I'll teach a two-day class that is open to the professional community June 22-23, in Vancouver. This is under the sponsorship of the Emily Carr Institute. For more information and to register, contact 604 844 3852 or email vcraig@eciad.bc.ca.

FMX'02 -- "WOW!"
Mega-animated thanks to Sven Pannicke and Thomas Hoegele of Filmakademie Baden-Wortemborg in Ludwigsburg, Germany. They arranged for me to teach three days at the Academy and to speak ("The Thinking Character") at FMX'02 in Stuttgart. What a wonderful experience! If any of the readers of this newsletter ever get the opportunity to do an FMX, I most heartily recommend it. These folks are serious about the art of animation, and they sure do know how to throw a party.

This year's guest speakers at FMX included Tim McGovern ("Total Recall" SFX Academy Award), Michael Kass (Pixar), John A. Davis (Director "Jimmy Neutron"/DNA Productions), Isaac Victor Kerlow (Disney), Andrew Daffy (Framestore/London) and Karen Goulekas (Visual Effects Supervisor, "Eight Legged Freaks"). Kei Yoshimiza and Hiromi Ito dazzled the attendees with samples of the very latest in cutting-edge Japanese animation, and Olcun Tan broke down the visual effects for "Black Hawk Down". I departed for the Stuttgart airport early Monday morning, May 29th, totally bursting from the visual delights and intellectual challenges of FMX. Thanks again, folks, for inviting me to participate. I had a heck of a good time!

CRAFT NOTES
"WHAT CAME FIRST? THE GESTURE OR THE EGG?"

For years in my workshops I've been teaching that the gesture preceded the spoken word in human evolution. It seems self-evident to me that we didn't spring out of a dust cloud spouting Shakespeare. Now I discover that this view is actually controversial among linguists. Some Big Thinkers, like Noam Chomsky, would beg to differ with me evidently. There is a new book out entitled "From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language" (Princeton University Press) by Michael C. Corballis, that is attracting a lot of attention because he is professing some of the same things I have been saying all this time. Let me tell you, it is darned disconcerting to wake up one day and find out that a long-held view is considered unorthodox. But I'm standing by what I teach. Let me tell you why:

Nothing is more important to the contemporary animator than gestures. In fact, if I could point to one single aspect of animation that is consistently subject to improvement, it would be the use of gestures. It is not that gestures are used incorrectly; it is that they are not generally used in an innovative way. Facial animation is actually pretty sophisticated nowadays, especially since Paul Ekman has contributed so much knowledge and research to the field. But the face does not act alone! Many animators seem not to know what to do with the rest of the body once they get the face done, and so they sort of vamp with these generic poses. I strongly contend that improvement in this arena of secondary animation will be a hallmark of development in the next and more sophisticated wave of the art.

SOME RANDOM NOTES ON THE USE OF GESTURES:

1) A gesture is not simply an illustration of the spoken word. It speaks of an inner emotional truth and can even work in juxtaposition to the spoken word. Michael Chekhov ("Lessons for the Actor") taught the Psychological Gesture, which is something I also teach in my workshops. Actor Anthony Hopkins, for one, is a big proponent of the use of the Psychological Gesture.

2) A gesture should not be equated with mime. Mime is what actors used before talkies. Charlie Chaplin's early work had mimetic qualities because he did not have words at his disposal.

3) A gesture is more than simple physical movement or behavior. It is purposeful and has a motivation. Biting ones fingernails or moving ones lips while one reads a book is not a gesture; it is shadow movement.

4) A gesture can be used to create in the audience a complex emotional reaction. The human sense of sight is many times more powerful than the sense of hearing. Therefore, if you have your character gesture in a particular way, it creates an impression that may well over-ride whatever the character is actually saying.

5) Humans are hard-wired to gesture. It appears to the observer odd and not-quite-right when an actor, whether he be animated or live, does not gesture.

6) The gesture precedes the word. I was once hired to do a parody of baseball great Joe Damaggio in a training film. I studied his old Mister Coffee commercials and discovered that he consistently got gesture and word reversed. He would look into the camera and say, "Let me tell you what I think." -- and then he would tap his forehead to illustrate where the thinking was taking place. Actually, the tapping would come just slightly prior to, and overlapping, the line. Joe was nervous and ill at ease in front of the camera, and so he did his gestures by the numbers. Say the line, do the gesture....say the line, do the gesture.... It was funny as hell once you saw what he was doing. And so I adopted that as my hook into the parody. It was one of the most successful short acting gigs I ever had. The client was roaring and rolling on the floor with laughter.

7) Stage actors learn early on that "acting has very little to do with words." Same is true of animation. Animators involved in feature animation receive the recorded lines of the script and then animate them, a procedure, which invites an over-emphasis on the spoken line. I realize I lack sophistication about this process, but isn't it true that, in early animation, the animation preceded the word? I'm not sure where it got reversed, but I'm not totally convinced it was a good thing from an acting standpoint. Communication begins with impulse and gesture, not with word.

Maybe it is just a useless academic debate about whether gestures preceded words in evolution. One way or the other, we got to where we are today, and the 21st century animator has the chore of balancing word with gesture in animation. Well, looking five or seven years down the road, I am convinced that artistic growth rests on a deeper understanding of the correlation between physical and verbal communication. The expectations of the movie-going audience have been raised to such a level that it would be impossible for animators now to turn back or to falter.