7 Acting Principle - Ed Hooks

Ed Hooks lists seven acting principles in Acting for Animators, which he describes as essential. They are:

1) Thinking tends to lead to conclusions, and emotion tends to lead to action.

2) We humans empathize only with emotion

3) Theatrical reality is not the same as regular reality

4) Acting is doing; acting is also reacting

5) Your character should play an action until something happens to make him play a different action

6) Scenes begin in the middle not the beginning

7) A scene is negotiation

In order to break down their context and relationship to the animator i am going to list where i feel they sit in the storytelling process of studio animation, and where they fit into that process.

1 & 2 are essential to performance and are subservient to the action of the narrative.

3 i feel is significant to the writing stage (but is still vital for the animator to understand)

4 i feel sits between 3 and 1 & 2 and is important for negotiating the action.

5 again sits just after the writing stage but also important to the establishing the chronology of the action

6 Scenes begin in the middle not the beginning. This is certainly true for live action. (In pantomime we always see the decision to leave home but never the actual leaving, we then join them mid journey for example). However, for animation we can extend this into performance.

7 this, as stated by Hooks, is suited to the scriptwriting stage.

Relationship Graph

This graph is my interpretation and breakdown of Hooks first principle. Thinking is thoughts and decisions that lead to conclusions ('I am going to do this'). Emotion (Automatic value response) is feeling and leads to action ('How i am going to do this'). It is a combination of the two that generates performance.