Term 2: Week 2 – Facial Acting (Or Body Acting Electric Boogaloo)

The second week of this new term saw us tackle a new exercise revolving around facial acting, or how we time and draw expressions. Out of all the exercises up until this point, I’m probably most proud of how this one turned out. But I’m jumping ahead, so here’s the breakdown of how this week went.

Steve gave a lecture on how the face works: we have over 5000 potential expressions to pull from our faces, and these all stem from 8 basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, interest and pain. What I was somewhat surprised about was how we can combine these different emotions at the same time to create subtle variations on these emotions, like pained happiness or surprised disgust.

The biggest takeaway I had from this lecture was the notion that body language leads facial acting. I was always under the impression that facial acting would be limited to the face, so I was surprised that planning out body acting would lead the expressions we’d be drawing later on. Throughout this exercise, I couldn’t help shake the feeling this was body acting round 2, albeit only focusing on the upper body.

To start off this exercise, we had to write down notes on what our character would do and what they’d react to. I decided to go for something comedic, and went for an explosive present that would explode in a characters face. From there, I decided Lupin III would be a nice choice of character, as it felt in character if he were to receive a present from Fujiko.

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Part of the reason I chose Lupin III was so I could also try out Marufuji’s designs. If you read my last post, you’ll know I favour more simplistic designs, and Marufuji’s feel like that. We have minimal shading, only present in one or two creases or below the neck and nose, and these characters can provide a wide range of expressions as a result.

I think the final version is one of my strongest animations so far on this course. While Steve said keep it simple, I added a few bits of FX work in the form of smoke to give character to Lupin at the start, and added other characters in the background to either get a reaction out of Lupin, or react to Lupin himself. The background was inspired by key art from Miyazaki’s feature film directorial debut The Castle of Cagliostro which I think helps give this short animation some context. I imagine I’ll be given corrections to make next week from Steve, but for a four-day animation, it’s turned out very well.

Wednesday saw a guest lecturer, Robert Bradbrook, come in to give a talk about what it means to bring characters to life. A lecturer at the National Film and Television School, Robert’s lecture was very engaging. It honestly felt like we were watching a real-life Woody from Toy Story come to life, I haven’t seen a lecturer so animated as he was.

The talk was extensive, showing examples of work along the way. The key points he discussed when creating and bringing a character to life were as follows:

1. Don’t just think of context, think about personality traits. By this, I mean don’t think about what the character does as an occupation, or details of their life story, what kind of personality do they have? Are they a cheerful person? Gloomy? Angry? And when thinking about these traits, consider how might a character react in a situation. If they’re see a wallet on the floor, would they steal it for themselves? Or would they return it?
2. Think about the audience. Citing the movie Up, Bradbrook talked about how audiences empathise with the opening sequence, despite this being an entirely fictional piece of work. They may be digital, but the qualities they inhabit help to make them feel real, and we establish ourselves a relationship to these characters when we watch animated media.
3. A narrative doesn’t carry the characters. We may have a story that has a plot twist or narrative beats and that these will inform the characters and their behaviours, but if they ever start to feel flat or boring as a result of the story being driven, are they truly alive?

With this in mind, here’s a list of things to consider when developing a character:

• Name and age: age is specifically important, as depending on their personality traits or their occupation, it might feel natural or it might feel alien.
• Personality (Performance): What emotions do they have? How do they move as a result?
• What do they want/ what do they fear losing? It doesn’t have to be a goal in mind that the character has, it might be something they have already that they want to hold onto before the end of the story.
• Character flaw: what’s holding them back from achieving their goal?
• Scenarios they might find themselves in: this comes in handy when working out how they behave and react.

We put this list into practice with a final exercise: Bradbrook told us to pick from a list of chairs, and interpret them as human characters using the list above. Here’s a quick sketch of what I imagined during the exercise:

Name: Charles
Age: 28
Occupation: Corporate boss of an IT firm
Personality: Arrogant, likes to be in control/take leadership, boastful about how rich he is
Flaw: If things don’t go his way, he’ll throw a tantrum
Holiday scenario: If a plane was cancelled, he’d run to the desk, ask when the next flight is, bribe them to get him on ASAP and call his parents to whinge about the plane cancellation.

Charles’ design was based off a red posh chair, which leant itself to boastful and arrogant, and hence why I’ve chosen for a vibrant, obnoxious colour palette.

And that rounds off week 2. I found this very helpful as I still am undecided as to which character design to develop and submit for March. Next week, I’ll be having a second go at the facial acting and see if I can make some a bit more expressive.