Today we spent the morning in the green screen room acting out our chosen scene for our Advanced performance animation class. We had to choose a dialogue scene with two characters from a film. I chose a scene from ‘Airplane!’ and acted out the two characters. One of them is just leaning on a wall and Luke suggested to act the other character out like a woman, to make the scene funnier. Walking around and acting like a woman was an interesting experience. I had to act out both characters.
Acting for animation is still acting, and requires many takes and practice to get just right. Perfect reference footage is essential as the performance won’t look believable enough. Getting into character is just as important for an animator as it is for a professional actor. You won’t be able to recreate a good performance in animation if you can’t act it out yourself properly. Acting classes are a good exercise to get you out of your comfort zone and this will feed into most aspects of your life, especially your working life as you’ll be working frequently with lots of different people you don’t know on a regular basis. This is an often overlooked part of the character animation process but everyone does it.
Luca's research blog 