Acting for animators

Acting for Animators By Ed Hooks.

Seven Essential Acting Principles:
1. Thinking leads to conclusions, emotions to actions.
2.Humans only empathise with emotion
3. Theatrical Reality is not the Same as regular reality.
4. Acting is doing also acting is reacting.
5. Your character should play an action until something happens to make him play a different action.
6. Scene begin in the middle, there is no beginning.
7. A scene is a negotiation.

Ed Hooks writing style is very easy to read and I really like the way he has put together this book for animators. He seems very down to earth and like he appreciates that as an animator we don't need to act for stage we need to get our characters to be actors which is a slightly different skill set.

I think he has a very interesting out look on his acting principles and he stands by them as being essential and a necessity since the time or Aristotle.

What I found really interesting of pages 55 and 56, is how character's have rhythms. I think that's why it goes so hand in hand with music videos. I think it's a very poetic notion to have but actually it makes a lot of sense, it's almost like there rhythms are there soul's otherwise there's no life there.

I've now finished reading the book. And although I appreciate his seven principles, the one I think is most important for this brief is the one about how acting is reacting. For this brief this biggest thing is the reaction to the song lyrics.

I think it's good to read things like this because even if you don't anaylse it deeply you're still bound to take the information in and process it in a different way.

My final thing I would like to comment on is how much I appreciate this last page pictured underneath. It's so interesting and refreshing to read what's expected in the real world from a grad student, and it's scary how soon that will be me. I really like how he makes it very clear that narration isn't appropriate if you want to be an animator because it's soul sucking of your characters. And I also really like the fact that this is someone saying there isn't as much pressure on being the best with the software it's all about your story.

I find that really exciting and promising that I might actually get somewhere in this industry, because most days I worry that it will be too difficult.