Acting

thoughts I've directly copy pasted from Ed Hook's online newsletter

Emotion is the primary thing that binds us humans to one another. Audiences empathize with emotion, not information. Animators, like other interpretative artists, speak to the audience with emotion.

A basic premise of acting is that a character needs to play an action to overcome an obstacle in pursuit of an objective. To me, a hero is an ordinary person who must act to overcome an extraordinary villain or terrible situation. A hero is a guy who goes out to catch the subway to go to work and, next thing he knows, he's running from -- and chasing -- the bad guys across the face of Mount Rushmore. A Villain is an ordinary person that has a fatal flaw. The trick to playing a character that is not smart is to remember that the character thinks he IS smart! There is nothing much funnier than a stupid person that thinks he is being clever.

A character's gesture is not simply an illustration of the
spoken word. It reflects a deeper truth and may even be in
opposition to the spoken word. We humans are wired by nature to read
and decipher the way that gestures coordinate with words. If
gestures come into conflict with words, we will tend to give the most
credence to what we see, not what we hear.It may be effective to have a character enter a scene because he wants to, but it will carry an emotional jolt for
the game player if the character enters because he needs to.

In acting terms, we know that a scene must have conflict, otherwise known as an obstacle or, my preferred designation, a negotiation. There are only three possible kinds of conflict: (1) conflict with yourself; (2) conflict with another character; (3) conflict with the situation.

A key to establishing a sense of empathy in an audience is to create believable life on screen. That means that the characters have to have survival mechanisms, and the audience needs to be able to relate to them.

And, most surprising of all, laughter has very little to do with jokes anyway. It is a "I'm OK - You're OK" kind of thing, an indicator of social interaction.

An EMOTION is an automatic value response. Emotion is a factor of a thinking brain. It has to do with the values we hold. Take away the thinking, and you remove any possibility of emotion. They go hand in hand. As a practical matter, how does this help an animator? Well, in general, thinking tends to lead to conclusions, and emotion tends to lead to action. Define your character, get him thinking, and then he will have emotional responses to whatever is going on -- leading him to physical action. The audience relates to the feeling that is behind the movement.

One way we are connected to one another is through empathy. We relate to one another on an emotional level. An audience empathizes with emotion. It puts up with thinking in order to get to the emotion. And to push this even further, the audience will empathize with the SURVIVAL MECHANISMS in a character, as they are expressed in emotion. What this means is that we humans act to survive, and we will recognize this tendency in characters on the screen.