Coming To Life

The Character Comes Alive

The Beauty of Animation

• Multi-sensory experience: “The beauty of animation is that there’s so much heart and so much they can tell you in a visual that’s compiled with beautiful sound and score and voice acting and movement”
• “All of these things that blended together just take you on this visceral experience that you really don’t get anywhere else”
• Bringing life to rigs: “You’re using these characters that are built, these rigs that are built, and you are bringing characters to life, pouring emotion to them, telling the story”

Character Performance Foundation

Performance Critical

• Performance importance: “Character performance is definitely pivotal for us to be able to animate properly”
• Initial dialogue: “We try to get scratch dialogue usually from the directors or someone on the creative team just to kind of get us started and understand the motivation for the characters, what the intention is of the scene”

Actor Direction Process

Character Introduction

• Actor briefing: “We kind of do a launch with the actor, we describe the character to them, we explain the art that this character has through the film”
• “We kind of just get them comfortable in that space of really thinking about who this character is”

Initial Sessions

• Starting approach: “So we start with a few lines, just how the actor would do it”
• Direction process: “Then we start to direct actor by telling them, you know, this is more of the emotion that we’re going for, or this is more of the moment”

Note

Development Timeline

• Wavelength alignment: “It takes a few sessions for an actor to get on same kind of wavelength as you”
• Magical connection: “And when they do, it’s so magical because they really capture the character, they become the character”

Character Evolution

• Ongoing development: “The more we work with them, the more the actor develops the character, and you find different flavors of the character that you didn’t really think about before”
• Voice discovery: “There’s moments where you’re like, this is the voice of the character, and I think this is the way the character should sound”
• Collaborative refinement: “Then it becomes a collaboration between you and the actor to be like, okay, if this is what you want, perfect”
• Actor experimentation: “Then there’s also moments where the actor is like, hey, can I try something? And then that little try something eventually changes the character in a way that you’re feels really exciting”

Performance Recording and Reference

Visual Reference Capture

• Camera recording: “As the actors are doing their performance, we have cameras that record the actors”
• Value for animation: “Just because sometimes they will do something that immediately becomes valuable to the animation team”
• Specific details: “Maybe they do something with their lip when they’re talking”

Animator Reference Methods

• Personal recording: “For the individual animator, they usually will have some frame of reference that either they have recorded themselves of them acting and then using that to drive what they’re going to do in the shot”

Balancing Reality and Stylization

Reality Base

• “You can pull in those things from reality, you can have that as a base and a starting point”
• “This is moving the way it should physically based on the proportions of this character that we’ve designed”

Creative Freedom

• “But then the animators can also break this arm, quote, unquote, compared to what would actually happen with somebody’s arm”
• “Or I want to bend the arm in the opposite direction of an elbow can actually do”
• “That’s where the animators kind of take free reign, let their creativity drive them to a appealing performance”

Essential Animator Skills

Drawing and Silhouette

• Visual foundation: “Being able to draw and understand a appealing and good looking silhouette is paramount in being able to be a successful animator”

Acting Ability

• Performance understanding: “And then ultimately knowing how to act is a huge aspect of it”
• Emotional depth: “Because you’re dealing with the depth of a face of a character that’s going to be performing a emotional dialogue”
• Technical precision: “Just getting honing the skills of like recording yourself doing a take of something and trying to see, can I get this lip sync super, super perfect so that it really feels like this character is delivering this line”

Final Performance Integration

Post-Recording Process

• Final implementation: “Once we get the final record from the voice actors, then we drop that into the scenes”
• Animation polish: “The animators take kind of like a final cleaning up pass of saying, you know, does the lip sync work? Does this performance still make sense?”

Story-Driven Decisions

• Core principle: “For me, every decision just comes from story and character”
• Experimentation purpose: “We are experimenting to find out what elicits the emotional reaction we’re trying to get to”

Character Development Complexity

Character Creation Team

“Great stories aren’t possible without great characters. So much goes into who the hero is before an actor steps foot in the recording booth”

• Collaborative effort: Directors, producers, writers, character designers, animators, story artists and teams of people
• “Making very specific choices to create a hero that is compelling, nuanced and worth following”

Character Questions

• “What are the hero’s super powers and flaws?”
• “How would they act in different situations?”
• “Are they relatable?”
• Complexity acknowledgment: “Characters are complex and there’s no right or wrong answer”

Hands-On Exercise Introduction

Character Design Exercise

• Building from module 2: “So back in module 2, you jotted down ideas for stories in logline form. Now, let’s build a character”
• Guide introduction: “My friend, director and story artist Jennifer Kluska is going to walk you through it”

Simple Character Creation

• Basic approach: “In the module materials, she’ll help you design a very simple character”
• “You don’t have to make it walk or jump”
• “You don’t have to create outfits or backgrounds”
• “You don’t even have to think about arms and legs”
• Starting point: “What you’re going to be working with is a simple shape. And let’s call it a blob”

Character Goals

• Personality focus: “A simple character that has a personality and makes you want to see it do more”
• Simplicity emphasis: “It sounds complicated, but it’s really simple. Just follow Jen’s examples and instructions”

Expression Sheet Development

• Final product: “Before you know it you’re going to have your own animated character hitting various poses”
• Expression range: “This is what we refer to as an expression sheet. It shows the character’s range of emotions”
• Creative expansion: “And as you get more comfortable with the drawing, feel free to explore outside the blob. I mean, you can design any character you want. Even ones from your logline exercise in module 2”

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Quiz Question: According to Imageworks’ Head of CG Brian Cohen, what two skills should an animator develop so that they can facilitate great character performances?

Full Correct Answers:

• Drawing great silhouettes ✓
• Being able to act ✓

Quiz Summary:

• Skills: Drawing silhouettes + Acting ability
• Not: Dialogue writing or 3D software knowledge

Animation brings characters to life through collaborative performance between voice actors and animators, requiring both technical drawing skills for appealing silhouettes and acting ability to create emotionally resonant character performances. The process balances realistic reference with stylized creative freedom to serve the story’s emotional needs.