Ed's Newsletter - March 2002

CHUCK JONES
As are we all, I am sad that Chuck Jones has passed. Here is a man that had a significant influence on my life, and I never even met him. Imagine that! We all go through life doing whatever we do and have no way of knowing what small effect we have on one another. I am not eloquent enough to stand alongside the lovely tributes I have read since Chuck died. I guess I just want to stand up here in my column and toss an animated salute toward a certifiably great man. Thanks, Chuck!
Beep Beep.

ED HOOKS E-MAIL ADDRESS
For those of you that have me in your address book, please update my e-mail address.
OLD: edhooks@best.com
NEW: edhooks@edhooks.com

ED WAS INTERVIEWED FOR WIRED MAGAZINE
Writer Lawrence Weschler is preparing an article for Wired magazine on the subject of photo-real animation. In particular, the article focuses on FACIAL photo-real. I spent forty-five really stimulating minutes on the phone with Mr. Weschler, a person that immediately goes to the top of my list of people I most want to have dinner with. What a marvelous conversationalist he is! He is one of those rare individuals that can cross-reference different disciplines rapid fire, jumping back and forth between history, literature, philosophy and religion. It was great fun talking to him. Anyway, my part in this has to do with acting issues. We talked about empathy, expression of emotion, what it means in acting, how it works. It may come to be that I will have only a single sentence in the final article because Weschler is interviewing some industry giants for this, but I am very happy simply to have been included in the discussion. Watch for the article. It will be in the June issue, which hits the stands mid-May.

CRAFT NOTES
"The Thinking Character"

John Lasseter was interviewed on the PBS radio show "Fresh Air" recently. Click here is the link if you want to listen to it.

During the show, he stressed repeatedly how important it is that animated characters in his movies display "true" emotion. He cited Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, animators from whom Lasseter first heard the term "thinking character". Johnston and Thomas -- and now Lasseter -- understand that all human movement comes from a thinking brain. And emotion in turn comes from thinking. Let's examine that for a minute because I think it is profoundly correct and not nearly as simple a concept as it might appear on the first glance.

When humans die, the moment of death is marked by the cessation of brain waves, not by cessation of heart beat. We have the science to keep hearts beating and bodies functioning for years and years, but once the brain stops, that's the end of the road. Our thinking brain is in fact a defining characteristic of our species.

But there is more to this picture. Dogs and cats and horses have brain waves and thought patterns of a sort, and yet they do not satisfy as a paradigm. Why not? The distinction between humans and lower animals is that we humans have volitional consciousness. That means we can know a thing is bad for us and still do it. A dog or cat or rabbit can't do that. Short of scientists imposing a carefully designed conditioned reflex laboratory situation, lower animals will operate on instinct, avoiding what nature tells them is bad for them and pursuing that which gets them into the next generation. For example, if you can get cigarette smoke into a raccoon, the animal will never seek out that kind of thing again. Nature tells the raccoon that cigarette smoke is not good for its life. A human can be holding in his hands the Surgeon General's report on cigarettes and lung cancer and still be puffing away while he reads it.

EMOTION

Now let's go to the next step by defining emotion, the other element that Lasseter seeks in his work. Toward the start of each of my Acting for Animators classes, I ask for student definitions of emotion. What I usually get are synonyms. "It's a feeling", is the most common response. "Yes,", I respond, "but what would you write if you were preparing a new dictionary definition of the word?" After a while, someone will finally start talking about emotional "response", and that is getting close to the answer.

DEFINITION: An EMOTION is an automatic value response.

If you and I both are shown the same photo of a gruesome murder scene, or a painting by Massacio, we will each have our own personal emotional responses to what we see. If you show a crime scene photo to a criminologist, he may just study it carefully. If you show the same photo to me, I might head for the bathroom. If you show it to a rabbi, he may just feel sad.

Emotion is a factor of a thinking brain. It has to do with the values we hold. Take away the thinking, and you remove any possibility of emotion. They go hand in hand.

As a practical matter, how does this help an animator? Well, in general, thinking tends to lead to conclusions, and emotion tends to lead to action. Define your character, get him thinking, and then he will have emotional responses to whatever is going on -- leading him to physical action. The audience relates to the feeling that is behind the movement.

One way we are connected to one another is through empathy. We relate to one another on an emotional level. When you feel bad, I feel bad. If I am happy and dancing around the room, it is likely to make you feel happy for me. An audience empathizes with emotion. It puts up with thinking in order to get to the emotion. And to push this even further, the audience will empathize with the SURVIVAL MECHANISMS in a character, as they are expressed in emotion. What this means is that we humans act to survive, and we will recognize this tendency in characters on the screen.

The first thing we do when we are born is try to live. The last thing we do before we die is try to live. Think about that. It is the secret of acting that Lasseter was hitting at. We think and so we feel. Thinking and emotion serves our survival as a species.