Courtesy of ArtToday.

I haven't taken acting classes. At Blue Sky we have brought in on several occasions acting teachers. Hopefully we can do some more work with them in the future. I found it helpful. We tend to get bogged down on the technical side of animation but I think we definitely need to get more abstract and understand more about what the actor's thought process is.

Up until recently you had to drop out the subtle stuff and just go for broad gestures but with computer animation advancements there is some amazingly subtle stuff going on with the characters. It will be interesting to see who becomes a really good animator and what skills are really valued. The people who are good at acting and can convey the subtleties that you get from good live-action actors will have opportunities to shine. The people who are good animators have a mixture of having the visual eye and sensitivity toward the process of acting itself.

Daniel Robichaud
Vice President of Creative Development, Vivid Animation

It is a well-known fact, at least within the animation community, that character animation is a form of acting, and you act through your character. This is why for instance in my film Tightrope, when it was time to assign a lead animator for each of the two characters, I wanted to make sure that the personalities of the lead animators would be similar to the characters that they would have to animate.

It is a general rule that for any type of a performance you need to put yourself into the skin of your virtual character and be it. You need to be a good behavior analyst. I think if there is a common denominator to the different personalities that I have encountered among character animators, it would be that they all have an integral sense of observation. I believe that keen observation is the most important skill to have because after that it is only a question of assimilating, analyzing and understanding what you have remembered from observing and then applying it to your craft.

Alberto Menache
Character Technical Direction Supervisor, PDI, and author of Understanding Motion-Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games

Depending on the project at PDI, the animators "act into the character," so they need to have certain acting skills. When I am setting up a character, I am aware of what the character is supposed to do mechanically, but it is always surprising to me, seeing it actually moving and coming to life. I am mostly involved in the technical issues. The people that actually design the characters come to me and ask if this is a character that is feasible to do in 3D and then we discuss which areas of the character are more complicated than others in those terms.

Courtesy of ArtToday.

I had a company that produced video games, visual fx, commercials and motion-capture. It's very easy to overestimate what can be done with motion-capture. Take Disney's 12 rules of animation, squash and stretch for example. How can that rule be followed by a human performer? A lot of clients came to us asking us to produce cartoon characters using motion-capture. They don't seem to notice we can't do that unless you have a magical performer. When humanoid characters are required, motion-capture can be useful. For example in Michael Jackson's Ghost, obviously it was better to capture the actual motions of Michael Jackson than have an animator try to replicate that. Ghost is a perfect example of what motion-capture should be used for, or if you need realistic movement for crowds or for stunts, such as in Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.

In many video games you usually have one person performing for each one of the characters in the game. Games playback resolution is still low compared to video. This is due to hardware limitations, so basically the real-time characters usually end up with no personality. When I had my studio, I found that most clients really underestimated the value of having a good director and a good performer. They would have one of their programmers do the motion. Nobody on the client's side would be directing. For video games you can maybe still get away with that but for commercials or visual fx that is really not acceptable.

Steve Giangrasso
Producer/Director/Production Manager, Sorceron

Our company deals with streaming technology, virtual characters and virtual set technology. Motion-capture turns animation into a director's medium whereby it's more like a live-action shoot. Motion-capture is more like pantomime than it is like acting. You have to overemphasize. Like acting in other medias, the performer has to interpret the character, mood, emotion, and purpose of the character for that script line.