Principles of Acting for Animators and Actors
In his book Acting for Animators, twenty-year veteran acting coach Ed Hooks lists his 7 essential acting principles.
While I agree with many of them, I’d like to explore them a little and perhaps offer a slightly different perspective on some of them too.
Here are Hooks’ original list:
1) Thinking tends to lead to conclusions, and emotion tends to lead to action.
2) We humans empathize only with emotion
3) Theatrical reality is not the same as regular reality
4) Acting is doing; acting is also reacting
5) Your character should play an action until something happens to make him play a different action
6) Scenes begin in the middle not the beginning
7) A scene is negotiation
Here’s my list of the 7 essential principles of acting for animators and actors, and a different perspective on the same principles.
1) Intention leads to action, thinking delays action, emotion is the byproduct of action taken to achieve an intention that means something to you.
2) We humans want to know what’s going to happen next. The use of suspense allows them to never get ahead of us in our storytelling. An audience empathises with a character that has something to lose. That creates empathy.
3) Theatrical reality and reality are different. Theatrical reality requires belief in the imaginary, and reality is boring. You can be authentic and truthful without need for reality, or its theatrical equivalent.
4) Acting is Doing, Reacting is also Doing. Acting is Action, Reacting is Re-action. Re-acition is another word for Action.
5) You should always go after your intention in every moment in every scene. If something gets in the way, change tactics.
6) Scenes begin in the middle, not the beginning. Completely true. Come in hot.
7) A scene is a negotiation. Yes, yes, yes, a dance not a fight, negotiating requires a broad palette of tactics, a fight only requires attack and defend.
Acting for Animators isn’t so different from acting for actors, but the differences ARE important.