Video: Lesson 2.2: Avatar-Based Performance. Three-minute introduction: scoring a speech into beats, the four variables per beat, and comparing AI voice with your own. (Instructor: build with make_videos.py or record and embed your own.)
Theatre Lesson Two: Harnessing Technology for Digital Drama. Recorded by the instructor for the 2025 pilot of this program.
Learning objectives
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
Score a monologue or scene excerpt into beats and map each beat to a performance decision (gesture, expression, position, camera).
Build an avatar-based performance of 45 to 90 seconds that sequences those decisions in an animation tool.
Use AI voice or lip-sync features and evaluate whether the delivery serves the text.
Co-review a peer's performance using a shared beat sheet.
Warm-up: the beat sheet (5 minutes)
Take any twelve-line speech. Draw a line wherever the speaker's tactic changes: from pleading to threatening, from remembering to deciding. Each segment is a beat. Directors and actors score scripts this way; animators need the same thing, because every beat becomes a change the software must be told to make.
Key ideas
Animation is performance, decomposed
On stage, an actor makes hundreds of micro-decisions continuously. In an animation tool, nothing happens unless you specify it. That forces the computational thinking moves into the open: decompose the speech into beats, recognize the pattern of shifts, abstract each beat into a few controllable variables, and sequence them on a timeline. Students who struggle to articulate what an actor "does" often find it easier when they must tell a character to do it.
The four variables
For each beat you control four things in most animation tools:
Variable
Options
What it communicates
Gesture and posture
open, closed, leaning, still, pacing
status and intention
Facial expression
a preset per beat
the emotional color
Position and camera
wide, medium, close; left, center, right
intimacy and focus
Voice
AI text-to-speech or your own recording; pace and pause
tactic and rhythm
Where the AI is
Tools such as Animaker and Synthesia offer AI text-to-speech, automatic lip-sync, and, in some, automatic gesture suggestion. They make the avatar look alive with almost no input, which is exactly the problem: default delivery is even, pleasant, and dramatically empty. Your beat sheet is what makes the performance mean something. Record your own voice for at least one beat and compare it with the synthetic version.
Activity: build an avatar performance (65 minutes)
Choose text. Use a 45 to 90 second monologue or two-character excerpt. Your Lesson 2.1 scene works well. Avoid copyrighted contemporary plays; public-domain texts (Shakespeare, Chekhov, Wilde, Glaspell) or your own writing are safe.
Score the beats. Mark 5 to 8 beats. For each, write one word for the tactic (plead, accuse, joke, remember, decide).
Fill the beat sheet. For each beat, choose a gesture, an expression, a camera position, and a voice note (pace, pause). This table is your algorithm.
Build. In Animaker, create one scene per beat. Add the character, set the pose and expression, place the camera, and add the lines. Use the tool's AI voice for the first pass.
Record your own voice for at least one beat and replace the AI voice on that beat. Note the difference.
Sequence and transition. Order the scenes, set durations from the voice track, and add transitions only where a tactic changes sharply.
Evaluate. Watch it once with the sound off. Can you see the beats change? Watch again with sound. Does the voice follow the tactics? Adjust two beats.
Export as MP4 with captions on. Name it Lesson-2-2_LastName_Title.mp4.
Beat sheet template
Beat
Lines
Tactic
Gesture
Expression
Camera
Voice
1
1 to 3
remember
still, hands clasped
soft
medium
slow, pause after line 2
2
4 to 6
accuse
step forward, point
tense
close
faster, no pause
3
Create and share
Post in the Lesson 2.2 Gallery:
The MP4 or share link, with captions.
Your beat sheet.
Which beat uses your own voice, and one sentence on how it differed from the AI voice.
A rationale of no more than 75 words: the beat that reads most clearly and why.
Your one-line AI credit.
Reply to two peers using their beat sheet: watch with the sheet beside you and say where the performance matched the plan and where it drifted. This is co-review, the collaboration competency in practice.
Resources
Animaker help: characters, expressions, camera, and text-to-speech.