chapter 10

the performance

chapter summary
		character animation
		comedy and comic timing
		subtle character animation

The important thing is performance - and that's not to do with the technique of animation - more to do with acting. Things like performance, timing, sense of comedy, feeling for poses and how to communicate - those are the things that apply across all techniques, and the things that make good animators.

Pete Lord, director, Aardman Animations

Figure 10.1 Pete Lord on the set of Adam © Aardman Animations Ltd 1991

character animation

As animator you are the director and the actor, through your hands this lump of clay becomes a believable character. Whether you are animating a dog, a dinosaur, or a human being, you still have to think about timing, expression, pose, silhouette, lines of action and choreography. You don't need to be an actor, but you need to know about the process of acting, about what reads with an audience.

It's very close to how actors think. I learned a lot from reading books about acting. Like Stanislawsky. I think I learnt from reading actors’ books but mainly watching, watching, watching.

Guionne Leroy

Guionne worked on Toy Story, Nightmare Before Christmas and Chicken Run. Her advice is pertinent to any beginner, and you should think about acting as a necessary skill to study in order to develop your animation. Although most animators would rather die than perform on stage themselves, they need to understand the process in order to translate the drama into their characters.

Jeff Newitt (animator on Monkeybone) explains:

I like the idea of being thought of as an actor. When I went to the States, they almost treat you as an actor, it really felt good. When Henry (Selick, director of Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone) would go through a scene, he would be going through the motivation, and then when you'd go through testing the shot you were encouraged to go for the performance and bring something to it. Then after the first test, talk about what elements were working. You felt as though you really were bringing something to it.

Performance is at the heart of good animation. Your characters are actors that have to perform, and as the animator you need to understand how to perform. If your character is to be angry, morose, cocky, or sensitive you first tend to think of the stereotype poses or movements for those characteristics. The good thing about a stereotype is that everyone recognizes it. And as you are in the business of getting your ideas across to an audience, using stereotyped characteristics is not a bad thing.

If you go back to the idea of animating an inanimate object or giving a character to a teaspoon or a matchbox, you have found it is quite difficult to do, without sound effects and without dressing it up. The skill in all character acting derives from mime. This silent art form has been admired by many as being the ultimate achievement in performance art. Even if an actor or a comedian has dialogue, they won't achieve the same effect unless they use persuasive body language. The reason so many of the great animated films have no dialogue is that the great skill of the animator is dealing in mime or body language, so films can be enjoyed internationally (e.g. Michael Dudok de Wit's The Monk and the Fish and Father and Daughter).

Keep it simple. Keep it economical. Some animators want to give you fancy stuff but it gets fudgy and messy. Instead of four gestures you can do one really important gesture. Let it breathe – let it have time! Do your homework and plot out the pauses.

Do dance training, go to the ballet – see how a dancer will hold a move – let it read, and then move on. Listen to music, the way a tune is developed and the breath before the next idea comes in. Look at sculpture – the way a story is told just from a single image from different perspectives. I think it's just getting this absolute clarity about what a gesture's about – what a pose is about – and don't ruin it by rushing on to the next one.

Barry Purves

The voices of experience all have the same message, but of course, it's easier said than done. The more experienced you are, the more you will understand what keeping it simple means. But if you use it as a mantra when going over your ideas, and planning your moves, it will help you.

Figure 10.2 Barry Purves’ Achilles © Barry Purves/C4/Bare Boards Productions

None of these skills are achieved overnight – people take days over moves. A very good student I knew, doing a project she had to complete in three days, spent two days without shooting a single frame, just thinking about her character. The exercise was to complete an action in character – walking through a door, find a surprise, and react. She spent two days thinking about her puppet's character and motivation. So that when it came to the actual animation, it was carried out quickly because she knew exactly how the puppet would move: how he would put his hand on the door knob and walk though the doorway, what he would see and how he would react to it. The animation was almost automatic to her.

comedy and comic timing

In animation, as opposed to real life, you may have to exaggerate your reactions for maximum effect. It is not a simple matter of rules – but to get a feel for it you have to act it out and develop your intuition. Remember to anticipate the movement to help it read. However small the movement it is still helped by a small anticipation.

Where you can really see timing at work is in comedy. For comic timing watch the geniuses of comedy and mime at work and study their timing – how they set up a gag. Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton – they were great masters of timing. Phil Silvers as Sgt Bilko, or Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe of Morecambe and Wise; and Jaques Tati's Monsieur Hulot. These are all people who have learned how long to hold a silence, or when to put in a shrug, or an eye movement to convey a big moment, because their incomes depend on getting a laugh.

The cartoon ’take’ is generally accepted as a 2D convention with highly dramatic squash and stretch action. Eyes popping out on stalks, tongues dropping to the floor, like Tex Avery's wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood. With model animation every now and then an inventive animator has ignored the static qualities of the medium and pushed it further. Richard Golezsowski, whose successful series Rex the Runt, about a group of doggy characters, employed plenty of squash and stretch, with huge, exaggerated movements by animating on glass, thereby avoiding the constrictions of gravity.

But there's no reason why you can't use some of the typical comic conventions in stop frame animation. If you are doing a ’take’ as in a comic reaction, the character can anticipate, hunch their shoulders, and then turn their head toward the action. This turning of the head can be repeated two or three times for effect (see Figure 10.3). Maybe the arms will go in the opposite direction (to counter the force of the head turn). Concentrate on the body movement first and the expression at the end. This gives much more impact. If the expression changes along with the speed of the move it kills the anticipation.

Figure 10.3 (a) Daydreaming. (b) Distraction: something causes her to glance left. (c) Nothing has registered, she has returned to her original pose. (d) Realization. The jaw drops and eyes widen. (e) Anticipation, the girl hunches down, so the next move will have more impact. Note the ponytail is following the movement down. (f) Action and reaction! The arms swing in the opposite direction to the head, to counter the weight shift. Courtesy ScaryCat Studio

The expression on the face should only change at the end of the move. There are various ways to do this comedy take – it can be extended with a small anticipation before Figure 10.3(d). If you try this sequence, play around with the timings till you've caught the transition from daydreaming to shock.

Comedy run: this is such a cliché, but good fun to try it, as once again it's a 2D convention, but can be done with our puppet – big anticipation pose, and then take puppet away, leave the stage empty! There are different ways to create a blur left by the character. Have the puppet attached to wire so that she can be swung across the set as you expose the frame, or as Pete Lord suggests, create a blur of Plasticine. Of course it can always be done in post production! You won't learn anything about animation from post production, but you will learn a lot from trying different timings, angles and keeping your puppet balanced.

Figure 10.4 Puppet pose in typical comedy run anticipation. Courtesy ScaryCat Studio

This brings us back to persistence of vision. So how much does the audience need to see? One of the great things about the human mind is that it fills in the blanks. That is how film works after all, we actually spend an awful lot of the time looking at a black screen, but we don't notice that. It's something to consider when planning your moves in animation. You can do the same sort of thing with kicking a football. To get the right impact with a foot kicking a ball is a tricky combination, as it relies on speed (and all the complexities of Newton's laws of motion!) – difficult to achieve with model animation. But what do you, the audience, need to see to understand that a great moment in sporting history has just occurred? You need to see the footballer approach the ball, draw his foot back – and – wham! The ball going into the net! Perhaps you don't need to see the actual kick and the trajectory of the ball for you to believe that that footballer scored that goal. Knowing what to leave out comes with experience.

eyelines

To convince your audience that your character is alive it is important to get the eyelines right. Think about the focus of their vision; whether they are gazing into the distance or at something close-up, the focus will change. If it's very close the pupils will be slightly crossed.

blinking

How often to blink? Well – don't go mad – but it's quite a good idea to blink on a head move. If the character's startled and does a ’take’ they might do a blink as the head draws back. People blink a lot when they talk. A shyer character will blink more than a bold one. The actor Michael Caine, when playing a difficult character, has learned to keep blinking to a minimum.

Have plenty of flesh-tone clay to cover the eyes standing by as eyelids just disappear. A one-frame blink, with the eye covered works fine, but you might want to refine that by giving it three frames.

With repeat movements, like blinking with the eyelid going down and up, you have to realize how it would read to the audience. Putting the eyelids half way both on the lids down frame and the lids up frame will make that position more dominant than the open or shut frame, as you are seeing it twice, so the shut frame won't register – the lids will only seem to go half way down.

Figure 10.5 (a) Blink (single frame). This sequence results in the impression of 1 closed eyes, as frame 3 does not register. (b) Effective blink sequence

more than one character

If you are dealing with more than one character, you have to think about which one is drawing the audience's eye. And where do you want the audience to look? Obviously the soundtrack helps, but it's a good idea to always think in terms of mime, so that you draw the eye towards the right character. Block out your moves so that you know they will maintain the right composition for your intentions, that one character isn't masking the other, or upstaging the other and so on. Make sure the camera is focussed on the right character at the right time.

Keeping the secondary character out of the limelight is an important dramatic technique. Watch how still secondary characters stay when the hero is taking centre stage. Unnecessary movement distracts the eye of the viewer. As we are not dealing with live actors we have to make sure our characters stay ‘alive’, in other words that they don't just ‘freeze’. An occasional blink or a very small shift of weight is enough to keep a character alive.

subtle character animation

Thinking always in terms of comedy effects can lead to the animation losing its flavour and becoming repetitious, going from pose to pose: Hold – move, hold – move, hold.

Subtlety is created by taking the animation further, using observation – looking for the expressions people use that are most telling of their character.

We did some live reference work for Chicken Run for ease of communication – so that Nick could get the ideas across. You could pick up what he was interested in right away – an eye movement – timing of a head gesture. … Generally you wouldn't follow the whole thing – but key things – and have them on hand.

Jeff Newitt, animated Mr and Mrs Tweedy on Chicken Run

In his short film Canhead, the American animator Tim Hittle animates the hero, Jay Clay, casting aside his weapon in a little, but beautifully timed movement that shows a huge, complicated emotion. In this movement he conveys disgust at the appearance of his own aggressive nature and an ability to shrug it off as quickly as it appeared.

In my own films there is no dialogue. The characters are just made from clay so I am able to sculpt any expressions that I need. A lot can be done with an eyebrow shifting or a mouth turning up or down. I watch silent films, athletes, and people in general. My main source of reference is myself. I go through the actions over and over with a stopwatch until I am sure of the timing, and then it is a matter of execution.

Figure 10.6 Still from Canhead. © Timothy Hittle

Look at how much of your character needs to move. In Creature Comforts Nick Park animated the Brazilian jaguar to start with, swishing its tail back and forth as he spoke. But very quickly he realized it was a distraction and just left it to hang. Only move what's necessary. In so much animation, especially early computer animation, there is too much movement.

To make another comparison, using Aardman's skills as an example again, the penguin, Feathers McGraw, in The Wrong Trousers is a magnificent example of under acting. Guionne Leroy, a Belgian animator who worked on Toy Story, Nightmare Before Christmas and Chicken Run elaborates: ‘With the penguin in Wrong Trousers, Steve (Box) was really teasing us, making the penguin stop – the sense of surprise. He can make a character move in a way that's full of life inside.’

So pacing and rhythm is enhanced by putting some stillness into your acting – only move what needs to move, or what helps the story along. Think yourself into the character and let your instinct guide you.

If your character is to be still – you want them to have reached a comfortable position to hold as a still pose. If they haven't achieved that ’relaxed’ look – a hold isn't going to work.

Creating subtle animation is a subjective business – research, sifting through reference material and constant observation is needed. Practising observation through sketching and life drawing, study of acting – using all these different approaches can only develop your skill, and then it can translate into whichever medium you want to apply it to – it is the essence of animation.

All animators put something of themselves into their puppets. It is a very full emotional experience for the model animator, as the performance is a one-off, just like a stage performance.

You feel this incredible connection, you feel you're giving them your soul, you're giving them your life, giving them your emotions. You're being a kind of channel for them really, allowing them to really become alive, allowing them to live with all the juice that they have. It's a wonderful, beautiful work. If you have this desire to offer your hands, your body and your sensibility at the service of expressing a life that is contained within a puppet, but needs a conscience to bloom – that's the beauty of it. To me that's the essence of animation.

Guionne Leroy