Character animation crash course

Acting in Animation -
Part 2: Dialogue
Here we'll concentrate on the broad technical aspects of animating dialogue scenes,
having covered most of the theoretical stuff in the previous chapter.
• Listen to the soundtrack!
Over and over again, in fact, until you have memorized the dialogue perfectly, with
all of the accents and nuances intact. Is the dialogue a series of sentences or just one?
Do you have to put across a range of emotions, or just a single thought? How do you
con vey to the audience that your characters are in control of their own thoughts and
bodies?
• Phrasing
Listen to the soundtrack carefully and think of an interesting pattern of movement
in which to couch a particular phrase or sentence. This pattern of movement should
serve two chief purposes: 1. to make a visual equivalent of the highs and lows found
in the actor's delivery. 2. To express visually the thought behind the spoken words.
It may be helpful to think of phrasing as a musical line (there is music to speech
patterns) with notes that naturally rise and fall. Many animators find it useful to use
a mirror to act out dialogue lines for themselves and then attempt to reproduce
the ir acting in drawings. Others prefer to invent or recall ways of expressing emotio
ns based on experience and intuition. Either way, by phrasing actions around a
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