Masterthesis: Schauspiel im Animationsfilm

The acting performance is known as a central part of character animation but only very little light has been shed on the means and tools of those performances and how they enable also abstract and caricatured characters and movements to make a totally believable appearance as characters for the audience to identify with. With the increased advent of animation in our daily lives and media and also a forecoming of the live-action movies to incorporate more and more animation as visual effects there’s also an increasing interest in the agency of both those who are the viewers and the creators of the performance. This thesis’ focus also lies in the effect and agency of the performing characters, who are the agents of the performance and covers the role of the audience members who also actively participate in the reception of a film performance. The bodies of the creators of the performance are not directly involved in the screen performance though, only as pre-performers. This condition is also part of the investigation how this affects the animators as performers and what techniques and tools they use, and can use, to deliver the appropriate performance through the animated agents. This thesis covers the manual process of creating keyframes on a computer for the performance of a digital character which uses a naturalistic style of acting and is similar to Stanislavsky’s method without copying the real, but transforming it through the process of animation.