10 SYNTHESIS

In writing up a reflection of the practical element of my project, I identified 10 activities or themes I had done, examined or experimented with to inform my practice.

1) Cinema: I visit the cinema once or twice a week. It gives me more of an understanding of acting, cinematography and the many other elements involved in film production. It allows me to disseminate the effectiveness of these methods and examine how they benefit the story.

2) Drawing: I've drawn a lot of faces and tried to capture emotion in various different people

3) Uncanny: I researched the uncanny valley and how it impacts audience empathy with characters

4) Medium: I animated with 3 different mediums to achieve a different visual style with each short animated clip

5) Acting: I studied Ed Hooks' book "Acting for Animators" to learn that no face is neutral because every thought is accompanied by an action, even very subtle ones

6) Exaggeration: This was the most important. Even subtle emotions are exaggerated in animation.

7) Rotoscoping: I wanted to see if animation that wasn't exaggerated in the slightest could still have the same weight and resonance as other animation.

8) Technology: The theme of my whole module. I used various technologies to measure the potential of each to create empathetic characters

Sketchbook Development Continued

I'm continuing to look into faces, relatability and performance.

A quote from David Robson and related photographs I've found. We all strive to relate to anything we possibly can, which implies that facial animation doesn't have to be excessively complex for people to understand or empathise with a character. The best example I can think of is Charlie Brown, who's face is incredibly simplistically designed.

I did a few drawings of faces around me to capture different emotions.

A character's performance is supported by the costumes they wear, the lighting, the context of the scene, the shot framing, the editing, their position in relation to other on-screen characters and about a billion other things. The animation alone plays a small part

More drawings and photographs of "neutral" faces

Carrying on my Practical Piece

I'm making great progress with my practical element, although I fear I'll not be able to do all the animation I'd like due to the time constraints. I'd have liked to animate in stop motion as well as with motion capture to have a broader breadth of examples from which I can draw my conclusion.

A frame of one of the clips in progress, drawn traditionally. This shot will be animated on twos, but to try and keep with the smoothness of the 3D CGI head, I've added plenty of ones to it.

At first, I drew lots of dope sheets but then realised I didn't need them. When animating on TV paint and with Maya, I can just import the audio files and animate accordingly. With animating on paper, I've used the Maya animation as reference, so I can work out timing of the lip syncing.

COP Session: Sentient Spaces

This session was really interesting, and taught us about how we could imbue inactive spaces and objects with personality in a way that I hadn't considered before in animation. In some cases this is very literal, such as in Seth Boyden's "An Object at rest" Where the object is sentient to the point where it has eyes and facial expressions.

The rock is the focal point of the animation

The concept of making an object sentient can also be more metaphorical and abstract, such as having a place SEEM alive, such as in Disney's "the old mill". When weather, or something that isn't sentient seems to take on a life of it's own, it's pathetic fallacy.

I made a 6 frame looping sentient space, inspired by the Disney short "the little house"