Week 8

Digital Acting – George Maestri

This article explores the relationship between acting and animation – and how studying acting can be valuable for an animator. It will help the animator learn how to create a character, understand a character’s motivation, clarify a character’s objective or intention in a scene, create empathy for a character, the importance of simplicity, and much more. This knowledge will inform the animator’s work.

This is something that never occurred to me. I suppose that if I thought about it, I would assume that a scriptwriter writes characters, scenes, and story, and an animator simply illustrates the writer’s creation. This article made me realize how important movement is to acting and character, and thus how much the animator’s work contributes to the creation and expression of a character or scene.

Also, as an ex-dancer and choreographer, it is interesting to me to think about the movement conventions that are used in animation, how emotion is translated into movement, and how a character’s objectives are broken down into actions/movements. It seems to me that an animator takes on some of the functions of a director in live-action film or theater, who blocks out scenes and tells the actors how and where to move. I never really analyzed animation in this way before, or really gave it any thought at all.

The Animation and Interactivity Principles in Multimedia Learning—Mireille Betrancourt

This is a scholarly exploration of the effects of animation and interactivity on learning. The author offers three main ways animation is used for learning:

· To support visualization and mental representation of concepts to be learned

· To produce a cognitive conflict, for example, in scenarios where learners are asked to choose the correct animation of a process or phenomenon from several provided

· To enable learners to explore a phenomenon interactively in a process that involves generating and testing hypotheses

She states that research on the effects of animation on learning has yielded inconsistent results, and that the real issue is determining when and why animation is more effective than static graphics. In some cases, animation can actually hinder learning: “It may induce a shallow processing of the animated content, and consequently leads to what can be called the illusion of understanding. Then the elaboration of a mental model is inhibited by animation.”

Animation should be used only when it is needed, such as “when the concept or phenomenon depicted in the animation involves change over time and it can be assumed that learners would not be able to infer the transitions between static depictions of the steps” and when learners are novices in a domain and would not be able to form a mental model of the concept without being helped by an animation. Care must be taken not to use animation when it would actually be counterproductive to learning goals.

This seems to be mostly dealing with animation used to convey concepts or processes, and not animation when it is used to engage the learner, possibly be adding entertainment value or humor to a piece of communication. The latter is also an important component of education, and the role of animation here shouldn't be forgotten.