Talk about great timing! I’m trying to brainstorm ideas for a new test and I ran across this video (thanks for the link Andrew!). Great inspiration and reminder to push for better ideas before starting to work. Check it out below:
Tips for Better Ideas from Andrew ‘Big Show’ Blodgett on Vimeo.
There’s a pretty informative post on John Kricfalusi’s blog about facial expressions. He covers different aspects from the elements that make up a facial expression, general expressions used by everyone, construction, etc. Definitely a good read. Hit the link below to check it out:
I was watching The Lake House on TV last night and thought this scene was pretty interesting. It’s an emotional take that Sandra Bullock’s character does when she receives a bit of bad news. In this clip you can see her initial reaction (the emotional take) to the news, processing what she’s heard, and then she re-composes herself.
**spoiler warning** (this clip kinda spoils the movie, so consider yourself warned)
Her head rotates down as her eyebrows raise and her jaw drops when she first hears it, that’s the take, her initial reaction. What I find interesting about it is how slow it is when it happens. Then it’s like she processes internally what she’s just heard. She blinks here, her eyebrows actually go up farther too. When she tries to compose herself and deal with the news, you can see it starts with her jaw closing then her lips pressing together and continues to the point where she looks away from the drawing on the wall.
So last week I recently finished up Jason Ryan’s webinar series on fundamentals. Really great stuff and I learned a lot. It was pretty refreshing to hear about these concepts again after graduating from Animation Mentor and working a bit. Kinda makes you want to jump back in and start anew with some personal tests for learning.
It was also very interesting to see his workflow using flipbook for planning and then going into Maya. I never really attempted it before, but I think I might with my next test. I can’t really draw very well, but it really makes you think about how your animation is going to work throughout the shot before laying down any keys. If anything I’ll learn a bit more about planning which is something you can’t really learn too much of.
Ran across this link earlier today and it’s a pretty interesting read about facial expressions. It goes on to say that emotional facial expressions are innate and not learned visually. It goes over a study where it compares sighted athletes to blind ones and how they produce similar expressions.
There’s also a useful bit in there about the difference between social smiles and true smiles. Social smiles use just the mouth area, whereas true ones cause the cheeks to rise and eyes to narrow.
Link: Facial expressions of emotion are innate, not learned, says new study
I thought these clips were interesting in regards to the eyebrows when watching these movies a few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to post something about them, but only now have had the time to put ‘em up. Hope you find this post useful!
This first clip is from Universal’s Wanted with Angelina Jolie’s character reacting to something that Morgan Freeman’s character is saying. I find it interesting because she looks over to him then there’s the slightest pause before her eyebrow goes up. It’s almost like she’s thinking, “say what…”, or something like that. It’s probably just me, but I haven’t given much thought to animating eyebrows like that. It could be really useful (dependng on character and situation), especially when you have a character in a moving hold.
This second clip is from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and I didn’t realize it at the time but it’s almost the same eyebrow action that happens in the Wanted clip, albiet in 2D form. What’s interesting in this clip is how the whole body contributes to the gesture instead of just the eyebrow moving as in the live action clip above.
So while I was out gathering all kinds of reference to start planning out my dialogue shot, I ran across a series of videos on youtube that just had all kinds of cool reference in ‘em. They’re a web series called “Screentest” by NYTimes.com/TMagazine.
Some things I found interesting with the above video:
I think these are great to study for head accents, blinks, eye darts, etc. pretty much anything to do with the head and face. Granted these people aren’t acting any specific character or emotion but it’s still a great way to study facial/head motion.
There’s a whole series of these so be sure to check ‘em out and keep on keepin’ on!