Animated Performance

Nancy Beiman is a professor at the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Oakville, Canada. She has produced, directed, designed, storyboarded and animated for television commercials, specials, features, and new media projects. Her employers have included The Walt Disney Company, Warner Brothers Animation and Bill Melendez Productions. Nancy has been teaching at college level since 2000, and her first book, PREPARE TO BOARD! Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts, has been adopted as a standard text by animation schools worldwide.

Foreword by Lynn Johnston. Preface: We're not in live action any more. Design for living: An introduction to thumbnails; Good actors: Designs that animate; An introduction to dialogue animation. Setting the stage: Character and story context: Don't just do something...; Within you, without you: Analysing the character; Character volume, size and movement. Is sex necessary?: Masculine and feminine character acting; The ages of man (and woman). Animal actors: Four legs good, two legs better? Creating animal characters; Flights of information: Animating winged characters; Portraying animal qualities in human characters; 'Look Ma, no hands!' Animating snakes, worms, and other crawlers. Fantastic performance!: Natural inspirations for the supernatural; Dual natures: Human/animal combinations; Floating worlds: The weightless actor. The performer as object: Moving the furniture: Bringing inanimate objects to life; Material girl: Fabric and cloth characters. Double timing: Animating character interactions: Staging and composition; Changing leads in multiple-character scenes; Potemkin villages: Crowd scenes and how to fake them. Character development over time: Character and story arcs. Inspiration and reference. Index. Acknowledgements.