BA1b: Expression in Animation

RESEARCH
Six Basic Expressions shown through Art.
For this I am going to concentrate on artists and illustrators who focus on portraiture as that is the route I want to go down with my work.

Me Attempting to Show the Six Basic Expressions.
Surprise    /Sadness/    Anger

Disgust     / Joy/      Stress
Stressed
    Danny O'Conner

'All Caught Up'- Danny O'Connor


Danny O'Connor's focus on multiple colours, a lack of focus, a lot of rough lines and use of sketchy lines express stress, as if the person in the painting can't do what they are trying to do.


Joy
Linzi Lynn

These paintings by Linzi Lynn are incredibly vibrant and colourful. They almost have a life of their own within the canvas.

I feel that these pieces express a lot of joy. 

I think the yellow backgrounds are also part of why these are such joyful pieces



Sadness- Guy Denning.

Guy Denning's use of colour, expression and painting style all give the feeling of sadness and sorrow. 

You can see an immense feeling of emptiness in this painting to the left in particular.

Dreyfus- Guy Denning

It's the body language in this picture that makes it express sadness. The hand on the face and the look of self doubt both emphasise a feeling of sorrow.






Anger 
 Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon's work shows an evident anger from the expressions in his portraiture's face.

Fear
Ken Currie

A lot of Ken Currie's work has a ghost/corpse like resemblance which gives the viewer an instinctive reaction to feel fear and repugnance.
Disgust
Maureen Gubia

I think that Maureen Gubia's use of colour in her work shows the feeling of disgust.

This is achieved by using sickly colours as well as colour that don't go well against eachother. 

This piece on the right clearly shows disgust in it's facial expression as well as the foamy substance that is surrounding the person in the portrait.

Surprise
Florian Nicolle

I really enjoy Florian Nicolle's work generally, I love his use of colour and line work to express emotions.

These pieces in particular, I feel, show surprise or something unexpected.
I feel that the purple is a good colour to show surprise and it's is a mix of red (which can be seen as a colour that shows immense emotion) and blue (which is much more subtle, like sadness)


Brief

The brief, in it's simplest form, is to show a change in emotion in a character through animation.

I wanted to consider the subtleties of expression and how different emotional states can actually be very similar for a person. For example, surprise, anger, fear, stress and sadness can all cause anxiety, I whole new emotion with it's own characteristics. But equally surprise can be mixed with joy just as easily.  I really wanted to show these subtle emotions in an abstract way. I didn't necessarily want to work with narrative and instead work with facial expression and body language.



My Idea

For my project I wanted to concentrate on a experimental art styles rather than having a narrative to show emotion and expression in my 'character'- if you can call it that haha.

I want to concentrate on Portraiture for this project, expressing emotion through facial expression, colour and shadow vs light to show how my character is feeling rather than expressing it through a storyline or plot. 

I chose to do this as I am interested in pursuing a career as an Artistic Director and therefore feel the art style and the feelings and metaphors behind it are just as (if not more) important than a narrative.

  I intend a close of a face expressing anger going into happiness in the space of 10 seconds as if the watcher is the cause of the character's/person's reaction.

I wanted the watcher to almost be the reason for my characters interesting but subtle change in emotion, as if you are having a conversation and have caused the reaction shown in the animation. I thought that this is the most true to life way of showing expression as we don't know what is going on in the character's head and are left to interpret her response however you will.


Colour
I think I may use colours sparingly in this piece, hinting at it more than making it integral. I want colour to improve my animation but I don't want to rely on it to get the feelings of the character across.

Lighting/shadow
I want to focus greatly on light and shadow in my piece. I believe that if I can do it right, the shadow on the face can act as a metaphor for sadness, anger, or stress. I then wanted to work with this metaphor and swift it round to put an emphasis on the light parts of the face to show a more light hearted way of thinking and a lighter mood.

Style of drawing
I am going to animate the 'anger to sad' section in singles as I want to create a rough and 
almost fidgety animation style.
I also want to animate the character fading in and out of emotions as that is more real to life. We don't just go straight sadness to happiness, we fade in and out of it, sometimes rapidly, sometimes over a long period of time.

Reference Video
My lovely friend Kirstie agreed to be my model/reference for this project and did a great job expression the emotions I wanted. 
I have a background in acting and film and so didn't find it too difficult to direct her to do exactly what I wanted and imagined for the piece.
I specifically wanted her to start on the left looking angry, look up when sad (to express the feeling of wanting to give up) and then to look to the right and down when happy to show that she is privately happy about something the audience doesn't necessarily need to know about.

Sadly I had a really stupid moment and didn't hold the phone landscape and so will have to work at fixing that later.


Traditional Sketches on Expression

Digital Paintings based Expression.

                                

In this picture I was trying to emphasis stress. 
I used very rough and sketchy lines ( like Danny O' Connor) on the shading, a technique I think I will continue into the actual piece.




FURTHER RESEARCH




Silvia Pelissero

I am a really big fan of Silvia Pelissero's work. I really like her use of water colours, they are not only beautiful but give the viewer an idea of what's going on in the person in the portrait's head.

I am considering using water colours in the background of my own piece if I feel the work doesn't emphasise emotion enough without the use of colour.



[Notes.]

I decided not to go with this in the end as I wanted to focus more on block colour.

Carne Griffiths

I really like Carne Griffiths use of multiple media that works with the image to create a rough yet defined image.

I also really like the way that the paint splatters go off the portrait as if the feelings are breaking out of the person.

As well as this I like use of light hitting the face against dark.






Eoghan Kidney- 'Fight like Apes' Music Video

I really like the way that paint is used in this video, I may use this style for the 'angry' part of my animation and then change the style for the 'happy' segment.

'Take on Me' by A-ha.

I like the style of this video a lot and am considering doing the shading of my animation in a similar way.

Kris Trappeniers.

I like line drawings a lot, they give the effect of shading and shadow with a couple of lines.

I may use this technique for the 'happy' segment of my work.









Russell Mills.


I really like the use of colour and violent line work in Russell Mill's work,
I also really like the way the black and white look on each other in this piece in particular and may think I may leave the initial animation quite plain and go into something more dramatic.


Helena Wierzbicki.

I really love Helena Wierzbicki's use of bright colour on more dull colours.

I really love the bright blue in particular in this piece.










Gerhard Richter




I know I'm not looking at any of Richter's Portraiture for this piece which is slightly off the main topic of my piece, however I think that Richter's prints are just as emotive.

The way he uses paint is incredibly expressive and I love his use of colour.

I am considering working in this kind of way for the back ground of my piece.

I had some earlier experiences with rotoscoping a couple of year back and was able to learn from my mistakes from before. For example, this time I work entirely on a computer instead of doing hand drawn 2D rotoscoping like last time, which I think, has created a much better effect.

Older attempt at Rotoscoping 
(Baby 18 year old Helena)

The Animating Process.

During the process of animating I encountered many mistakes, I managed to completely deleted my original version of my animation.
Here is what it looked like originally:


1 Second:

3-4 Seconds without eyes:

7-8 Seconds:

This has taught me a valuable lesson in backing up my work several times (Losing 40-50 hours of work does that.

Luckily, when I re-animated the piece it didn't take as long as I knew exactly what I was doing the second time round.

Moreover this gave my time to truly develop the style I was trying to get across in the first version and I actually much prefer the style of the new version.  It gave me a chance to really work on the darkness vs the light theme in my work.

Final Piece Un-edited.

Edit 1:

I added more frames to the anger into sadness part to extend it out longer and extended the gap in between the angry into happy part.

I also slowed down the 'happy' part so it seems more easy going and the brush strokes are less brutal to look at in the second half.

I accidentally cut out the end of the video which I will fix in the next one.

Edit 2:

For my next edit I am going to look in to extending the 'fade aways' further and working more a fade out in to the outro part.

Final:

In this edit I fixed the formatting error i made earlier, made the face disappearing longer and more obvious and also made some changes to the timing in piece. I also faded the video out so the ending isn't as abrupt.

I didn't have time to put colour into this piece as I had originally wanted to, however I feel that it works well as a piece with out so I am happy with the way it turned out.