Expressing one’s emotions

Quite often, I’ve seen examples of 3d artists model fantastic looking characters, but when you see them in motion they don’t feel the slightest bit alive. Alive meaning they have vitality and personality. What drives most successful animations is how much the audience is engaged with the characters on screen, they can relate and understand the character due to the personality found in the actions, reactions of the animation. Even if the character isn’t a human

This is quite a tough subject to discuss due to my lack of english skills… haha …but I’ll try to be as clear as an empty beer bottle So… why should we care how we animate a character? Personality and believability.

Humans (being of the human species) can understand a character’s state by only having to see extremely subtle movements. A character’s expression don’t have to be obvious to understand. Let’s say you wanted an old man to look angry at someone, instead of the obvious expression of nostrils flaring, teeth showing, eyebrows angled inwards and eyes squinting. You could have have an obvious default look with with the eyes and eyebrows slightly twitch followed by a slow but purposeful turning away. Remember the saying ‘less is more.’

Of course that example would be best suited for a more realistic and complex animation. But that’s not to say you can’t get the same reaction if the old man had a lot more cartoony movement. This all depends on what the animator wants the audience to feel about that character in that particular moment.

We understand humanoid characters very well, since we have the ability to compare them with ourselves. But what if the character was an object, like a tennis ball, or a piece of paper? Then we’d have to take account of how “we” show our expressions and transpose those into the object physical presence. The difficultly of this task is the physical difference between the two. A tennis ball obviously doesn’t have any hands or feet. So how do we express a tennis ball waving? A smart animator will consider the limitations of the its physical appearance and work out the best way to use what it lacks. This case, being a ball, a simple hand wave can be expressed with the ball jumping up and down in a fast and excited matter, and possibly assuming a tear-drop shape that is trying to reach for the sky. If you wanted to show the ball looking both left then right, you’d animate only the top half of the ball to twist…we will interpret this as a human body with the head twisting both ways.

A well known example of this is one of Pixar’s early short films called Luxo Jr. The character featured in it (which is now their company logo) is a the desk lamp. The Luxo Junior only has a few limbs, about 5 separate joints, and a cord that acts as a tail while it animates through the scene. If you think about it, It’s not much to work with but if you’ve seen the short animation you’ll be amazed how easy it is to understand the emotion and expressions the lamp shows. It’s mostly how they animated the light bulb part of the character, just by using simple gestures like slowly looking down, you can tell its feeling sad. Of course we have to take account how the whole body animates as well as the light bulb part.

There is no excuse for any object not have a personality that shows, regardless the limitations in terms with the number of limbs, size and colour. It can be rewarding to experimenting with common place objects and see if you can create a living character out of it, without adding extra limbs A good animator will take what it lacks and use it as an advantage to expression emotion we other wise would not see.