I also wanted to look at exaggeration, which, as I mentioned before, is something I adore in animation. Since I am fairly limited with the character I was given, I decided to mess around with the face of the character, to see how much freedom I actually had with the character's expressions. This would also prove useful for when I am making the storyboard and I need to know the poses I draw on each panel is even possible. So what I did was I made Moom pull a bunch of faces then drew them. I decided to draw them so that I would know how extreme his emotions could be and I could learn to draw them well for the storyboard.
This wasn't the only thing I did, mind you. I had to see how I could animate poses for Moom as well. So afterwards, I made a little video of Moom making random faces and gestures to practice animating and transitioning between emotions. I was still learning to animate Moom at the time so this wasn't exactly perfectly animated, but it was good for this.
A while ago, I looked all the different performances that would influence the acting in my animation. The performances were all very relevant to the type of acting I would end up doing in my short, since they were performances that established their character's insanity. I figured before recording my dialogue, I would practice by filming myself re-enacting a scene from one of the characters I looked at. I chose to try out part of the Lloyd scene from The Shining, since it kind of resembles the performance of my character and the peak of going insane.
I'm no Jack Nicholson, let's that straight, this was still a decent performance for me, and it totally got me prepped for my voice acting. I did the Kubrick thing of recording a million takes before finding the perfect one. I'm perfectionist, which is kind of a weakness of mine, but hey, at least it leads to perfect results. Well, maybe not this time, this was just practice after all.
I've been intrigued with acting in animation for a long time. It's always been something I've taken into consideration as an animator, because I've always seen it as a major fundamental. They should add it to the 12 fundamentals... make it 13 fundamentals already! Anyway, in a theoretical standpoint, I would consider both the voice-acting and the character animation together to equal that of importance, in conjunction to theatrical and/or live action acting. The voice actors work their well-earned energy into the delivery of their dialogue, the storyboard artists, directors, scene planners, and animators then work out the key-poses for the character animation, using the same exact mindset as any live-action actor would of "how do I convey this emotion" or "how should my body language work in conjunction to this setting" and "does the tone of this voice add or fit in with my actions."
Some animators even use real actors (sometimes the voice actors themselves) to play out a scene so that they know what key poses to draw, like this clip from Alice in Wonderland, where the actors play up the characters rather well in the reference footage, and the audio from that footage was even used for the movie. You can see Walt Disney, presumably, drawing the key poses he's looking at while they are filming.
This is different to rotoscoping, however. When you rotoscope, you draw over the frames, which is different to using footage as reference. Actors will often chew the scenery a little when they are being animated, though. A Scanner Darkly is an example of that happening.
Acting in animation can sometimes work without reference, however. Take the Ren & Stimpy Show for example. There doesn't seem to be much mention of any sort of real-life reference John Kricfalusi used when he was creating the poses for that show. He would normally draw every key pose on a layout sheet, without using a reference, and given the nature of his animation style, it does add a lot to the amount of exaggeration each pose contains. These layout sheets would normally follow a storyboard for the scenes, since they were normally just rough ideas on how the scene would play out.
This took a lot of work, however, as the layout artists would have to pitch different poses for the layout sheets and they would sometimes go through a tonne of different key poses until they decide which one is funniest, and most unique one. They worked though, and as a result, the acting was always funny and memorable whenever they used this method.
There isn't really anything wrong with either method, since they both convey emotion very well in their own ways. Ren & Stimpy's cartoony style and tone is reflected in the character's acting and is what makes it funny. The acting in Disney films is incredibly exaggerated, in terms of style, but using reference videos prevents them from automatically making something look too silly, which is good for when the films try to be emotional.
