IGDA Chicago - Meeting Report

Meeting Report

Meeting with Ed Hooks

November 2002

by Carrie Gale

Roughly thirty of us met last Tuesday at Ed Hook's Acting Studio for our November Chicago IGDA meeting. Ed Hooks travels all over the world speaking to gaming companies and studios about acting for animators. Most recently he taught at Angel Studios in San Diego, Volition in Champaign, and will be traveling to Disney in Australia this month.

Ed Hooks explained the principles of Acting for Animation and the use of power centers in characters. In addition to video clips, several brave volunteers entertained us by demonstrating their acting skills to alter or exaggerate their natural power centers. Ed's presentation was fantastic, and lasted several hours. Due to the strong response from this presentation, we are hoping to have Ed speak again at a future meeting to cover more of the topics he discussed.

Here are my notes from Ed's presentation. For those of you who were resent (or Ed), please feel free to e-mail revisions/additions):

Principles of Acting for Animation:

1) Thinking - this tends to lead to conclusions, and emotions lead to an action. This is the key to character analysis. You feel an emotion, then do something about it, therefore emotion dictates behavior.

2) Acting is doing and acting is reacting - you don't want to confuse doing with just movement. Theatrical reality is not the same as regular because it's compressed in time and space.

3) Characters must have an objective. Obstacle = conflict = negotiation (these are all synonymous with each other). You can have conflict with yourself, with the situation or with another character. For example, if a man robs a bank, first he has conflict with himself, "should I do it?". The conflict with the situation might be, "are their security cameras", and third, conflict with another character when asking for the money. Theatrical conflict does not have to be a fight, but you must have conflict in your main scenes.

4) Play an action until something happens to make you play a different action. Playing action is like beads in a necklace, each bead has to connect to another. You can't play an action then take a time out.

5) All action begins with movement

6) Must have empathy with your characters. Ed explained this is the battleground between feature films and video games. The next generation of games however, will have a whole lot more emotional wallop, but they still have a problem with empathy. Feelings are what connect us, and are what we are wired to respond to. One way for gaming companies to go around this is to give you a buddy who you have to connect to, watch out for, but cannot control. You want to start with he feelings of your characters rather than the movements.

Food for our meeting was generously donated by Criterion Software, makers of Renderware. Unfortunately due to our legendary Chicago weather, our speaker from Criterion's flight was delayed several hours, causing him to arrive at the very end of the meeting. Hopefully they will be able to come back for a more thorough demo at a later date. If you have any questions however, please e-mail me and I can put you in contact with them.



		Meeting Report Meeting with Ed Hooks November 2002 by Carrie Gale Roughly thirty of us met last Tuesday at Ed Hook's Acting Studio for our November Chicago IGDA meeting. Ed Hooks travels all over the world speaking to gaming companies and studios about acting for animators. Most recently he taught at Angel Studios in San Diego, Volition in Champaign, and will be traveling to Disney in Australia this month. Ed Hooks explained the principles of Acting for Animation and the use of power centers in characters. In addition to video clips, several brave volunteers entertained us by demonstrating their acting skills to alter or exaggerate their natural power centers. Ed's presentation was fantastic, and lasted several hours. Due to the strong response from this presentation, we are hoping to have Ed speak again at a future meeting to cover more of the topics he discussed. Here are my notes from Ed's presentation. For those of you who were resent (or Ed), please feel free to e-mail revisions/additions): Principles of Acting for Animation: 1) Thinking - this tends to lead to conclusions, and emotions lead to an action. This is the key to character analysis. You feel an emotion, then do something about it, therefore emotion dictates behavior. 2) Acting is doing and acting is reacting - you don't want to confuse doing with just movement. Theatrical reality is not the same as regular because it's compressed in time and space. 3) Characters must have an objective. Obstacle = conflict = negotiation (these are all synonymous with each other). You can have conflict with yourself, with the situation or with another character. For example, if a man robs a bank, first he has conflict with himself, "should I do it?". The conflict with the situation might be, "are their security cameras", and third, conflict with another character when asking for the money. Theatrical conflict does not have to be a fight, but you must have conflict in your main scenes. 4) Play an action until something happens to make you play a different action. Playing action is like beads in a necklace, each bead has to connect to another. You can't play an action then take a time out. 5) All action begins with movement 6) Must have empathy with your characters. Ed explained this is the battleground between feature films and video games. The next generation of games however, will have a whole lot more emotional wallop, but they still have a problem with empathy. Feelings are what connect us, and are what we are wired to respond to. One way for gaming companies to go around this is to give you a buddy who you have to connect to, watch out for, but cannot control. You want to start with he feelings of your characters rather than the movements. Food for our meeting was generously donated by Criterion Software, makers of Renderware. Unfortunately due to our legendary Chicago weather, our speaker from Criterion's flight was delayed several hours, causing him to arrive at the very end of the meeting. Hopefully they will be able to come back for a more thorough demo at a later date. If you have any questions however, please e-mail me and I can put you in contact with them.