Ironically, getting specific with your characters doesn’t limit your acting and animation choices – it actually gives you more useful ideas to introduce.

With a two person dialog scene you have so many options that it’s likely to be pretty hard to come up with something that isn’t cliched and generic.

Once you’ve established that the two people are doctor and patient, or father and daughter – all of a sudden you have lots of ways to be creative with the specific choice.

Looking forward to more posts.
–Phil

Rob Somers:

If I can make my character read clearly and sincerely without any dressing at all (hint: this is just like animating an early rough pencil test that is more gesture based than “on-model”!) .. if I can find the character, and more importantly, OTHER people can see the character when the rig looks completely bland, then I know I’ve done my job as an animator.

This sounds like a great idea. It might be worth a try. However, I would think you have to be very careful, since dressing up the character can sometimes change the shapes or silhouettes you’re working with. The first thing that came to mind when i read this was a cowboy hat (extreme example, I know). When you put it on your naked character it immediately changes your perception of him – so it’s not the same as animating the character completely bland. Yet, it’s not the type of thing you could leave off til the end, since such a wide brim would change a lot of your performance and posing. Sometimes you would end up hiding the eyes if you didn’t mean to, for example. I suppose I’m just being a pain But it does sound like a good idea.

Alan Sperling:

I used to get weird reactions from fellow industry people when I would say that I found watching people far more interesting than watching most animation…
Animators for the most part live in the animation bubble. When the Dick Williams book came out you started seeing a lot of his animation examples being used on characters whether it made sense to do so or not…
It is easier to copy old animation and blindly follow rules than it is to try and find the true story within your character and let that guide you…

I definitely agree. I am often way more enthralled by live action than animation. Even terrible reality shows are worthwhile if only to see real people having real reactions. No acting.
I try to get my ideas and inspiration from live action rather than watching other animation. I don’t want to keep reusing old (even though proven) acting choices you’ve seen many many times before.
I also try really hard not to put something into my animation simply because ‘it’s a principle.’ I think it’s really easy to get pulled down that road and add things that aren’t really called for in the scene, but you feel like you have to do it anyway – because Richard Williams or Frank and Ollie said so.