The way we work at Pixar when portraying an emotion is to start with the body and touch the face last. One of the best ways to portray an emotion is to come at it from a pantomime point of view and ask yourself: how can I communicate that emotion with my body? If you have something that works without the face then adding a little something with the face only enhances what is already effective. Ultimately, you want to be able to turn the sound off and almost get a primal feel for what is happening in the shot.

Courtesy of ArtToday.

Another tool we use to help us come up with a good performance is videotaping voice-over recording sessions. In the course of a recording session, an actor may do 10 takes of a line. For an animator it's fantastic. It's like an all you can eat buffet. You can grab a hand gesture from take two, use the eyes from take four, and be inspired by something the actor does with his head in take seven when the director picked take two as the final select for the film. How much movement an actor gives to the camera when recording varies from actor to actor. However, even an actor who isn't gesturing with his hands can be helpful for facial expressions. Very often the rhythm of the dialogue will greatly influence the rhythm of the shot and provide a framework. However, it is up to the animator to "compose" the character's movement. Punctuating every verbal note with a body movement is messy and confusing -- too many notes. I generally find things that have a very regular rhythm are not that interesting. It's important to create a push and pull and manipulate the rhythm to keep the shot interesting. A good script, a good actor, and a really fun dynamic read? Give me that and I am as happy as a clam.

Craig Kellman
Visual Development and Character Designer, Disney Feature Animation, also Character Design Instructor, Gnomon Institute

Most character designers think only about design and not about character. It helps me to focus on the fact that no matter what these characters are, I should be getting inside their heads, and I should be treating them like a character that I would be acting. You have to be acting, or the characters are just going to be designs. They are going to be lifeless, or they are going to be very cliché and stagnant. You don't want clichés. You want to be looking at a character from many different angles, just as an actor would. A good actor would be thinking about not only the external character, but the internal one as well. Let's say the character is a teenage cow. I am going to think about what makes this character not only a cow but inherently teenager. Maybe he's very gawky and awkward. Visually, I might want to give him these long appendages, a high center of gravity and oversized hooves -- like a pubescent teen whose hormones are out of wack.

Courtesy of ArtToday.

I think it is important to continue to study acting, because acting is in design as well as in animation. Once a design is done, a good animator, if he's a good actor, is going to make that design come to life. If the character designer is a good actor to begin with, he's going to make the animator's job that much easier.

Jim Bresnahan
Lead Animator, Blue Sky Studios

We are doing a lot of commercial work. It is pretty obvious what the character needs to do if it has to perform for a commercial. On that level we are just concerned with how it should move. For a bar of soap, I would just do thumbnail drawings, and for a more complicated character I would act it out myself. The commercial jobs are generally not story driven and there isn't time for character transformation. We just go for what is entertaining. About three years ago we did a spot for cranberry nut cereal. We had to do a tango between a cranberry and an oat flake. We tried to do it ourselves but none of us could actually tango. So we brought in a couple of tango dancers and video taped them which was helpful. However, in most cases we don't have to bring in live models. We can find reference on tape.

One of things that I think makes a good animator or helps people animate better is to have a kinesthetic sense. A sense of your body allows you to pose characters and perform while you are sitting there in front of the computer motionless except for your hand. Like music, timing and a sense of structure in the timing of the animation is also very important. The best way to improve your animation is to develop your sense of pacing and timing. There might be something about a particular walk cycle that really feels good because it has that underlying musical structure. You might not be able to explain it when you see one piece of animation versus another but that's why something looks better. It's got an underlying musical structure whether it's based on 4/4 time or another meter.