Friday, 16 May 2014

FMX: Facial Animation

Chris Landreth
Facial Animation

This one was one of the most interesting talks I've attended, not impressive, interesting. 
Mr. Landreth is a really funny person can easily tell that he's very passionate about his job!
He brought a lot of energy into the room, made us pull faces to prove his points etc.
Mostly we covered a lot of theory during this talk but it's ok, it was so interesting I didn't mind no tseeing as many visuals, apart from the man pulling funny faces at us to show us which muscles we use during certain emotions! It was a really entertaining talk!

In dramas 75% of the shots are of faces. purely because that's how we portrait most of our emotions.

Observation is the most important.
It's all about the shape and movement.

Fusi Form Gyrus is a part of our brain that recognizes faces.

FACS: The Facial Action Cooling System.

Primary muscles of the face, there are 14, to 41 action units.

He showed us several muscles on your head and explained how important it is to use those in specific order+ combination to portrait specific emotions because skipping on one can be a difference between a real smile and a really fake/creepy looking one.
He had a model ready to show us that even a tiny movement of your bottom eye-lid makes a difference.
From this talk I have learned quite a bit actually. It's not something I want to write about because it'd mean that I have to give you the names of all the muscles which aren't easy to pronounce, nevermind spell. As I mentioned before, observation is key! You can easily figure it out. You can also then put it into practice by pulling faces at yourself in the mirror, which is something he recommended doing!
If I ever come around to having to animate a character in such detail I will definitely use all this information!

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