The Awsomeness of Ed Hooks!

Coming up, my final poses! (Exciting stuff)

But first, I thought it would be good to include the notes I made from Ed Hooks Animex lecture on empathy. Getting the audience to relate to, and care about the characters.

Although it was geared towards the games side of things, allot of the points he made were still relevant…

• It’s kind of difficult to sum up what empathy is but he defined it as a reaction to emotion in others (So it’s different to sympathy, but you can still feel both)

He also laid out the thought processes in a nice neat way, which I found really helpful.

Thinking >leads to> conclusion

Emotion  >leads to> reaction

So to a certain extent this is a nice little formula for working out the differences between animating involuntary and voluntary motions in my characters.

• You should always think about showing the characters reaction to their emotions, not just that they are feeling a certain way…

If a character is simply sad, there is nothing in that worth watching. You have to show them reacting to their feelings, and encourage the audience to wonder “why?”

• Next point. We are all born with the capacity for empathy, but first we need to develop a set of values, in order to react this way. So attempting to get an audience of 5 year olds to empathise with a characters sadness wont work.

(However in films such as Lillo and stitch etc, they still include this element to attract older audiences)

The 7 basic emotions we empathise with-

Happy

Sad

Angry

Disgusted

Contempt

Fear

Surprise

If your character is experiencing any of these things there is an opportunity for the to engage your audience.

• A sociopathic character is unable to feel empathy towards others -

And so the audience is unable to feel empathy towards him.

Hooks made a really interesting point about players not feeling for their game characters, because they control them. They aren’t recognised as human.
(even on a story telling level) 

Inorder to have the player feel for their character they have to have an element of unpredictability to give them a sense of “life”

He told a story about a guy playing Sims, and trying to kill his character by locking her in a room until she starved to death. This was fine until the character started crying, and he couldn’t make it stop. Because of this element he couldn’t control, (even in a game all about controlling people) the character became more “real”. Which made him feel bad and eventually let her out.

• The aesthetics of the character. How they look. Is a very important tool for telling your audience what kind of story to expect, and how to react.

For example, if you were watching a cute Disney style cartoon you would accept it as just that, and enjoy the light hearted adventure. And if one of those cuddly critters is then brutally and graphically murdered, you would be caught off guard and not be in a position ready to feel for what is happening to the characters.

• This final point is just a little side note that Hooks talked about, but I thought that it was a lovely point, that I hadn’t really thought about before. We have learnt about the mechanics of blinking, but not why/when we blink.

Apparently, (and I’ve tested this out and found it to be true) we blink at the conclusion of out thoughts, NOT for emphasis.

So I would think “oh I must tell him that-“ Blink- and tell them

The other person hears and as they understand- Blink – and reply to me

• Lastly, he also gave us a link to a website called “cultureogempathy.com”

Which is basically just people talking about empathy in all walks of life.