Evaluations for each artefact

EVALUATIONS OF ARTEFACTS

ARTEFACT 1

My first artefact was made to be a base on which to build my practice led research. My written research focussed on how emotion and personality enhance an animated film, so I wanted my first artefact to be a simple experiment on how to animate an emotion. To keep it simple I did not use any reference material and thought that I could use my memory and what I believed to be correct movements and expressions. By doing this it meant I could make a greater comparison to my later artefacts.

I decided to use a ready-made rig for 3ds Max taken from the 11 Second Club. I was going to use one of my own characters but I didn't think this would allow me to explore any ideas properly as the characters faces were not properly rigged. Using the Max rig was a lot simpler to use and had easy to understand controls so I was able to concentrate more on what I was trying to accomplish with the artefact rather than worrying about something going wrong with my own character.

As I was looking at the character animation I wanted to keep my artefact silent so as not to over complicate it. I was trying to show a sad emotion and music can help to show people what the feeling is but I wanted it to be focussed on the expressions and movements.

I thought it would be easy to animate without any guidance but animating emotion was actually a lot more complicated because there are a lot of elements to each emotion that you need to think about. This artefact has helped me to see this and so I can make my other artefacts better by applying what I have learnt from this artefact to them.

I am not entirely happy with this artefact but I think it is a good starting point and I have learnt a lot from it.

ARTEFACT 2

My second artefact was made to explore how people use various parts of their face to express emotion, for example using their mouth and eyes when smiling. For this I researched how you would draw these expressions as I thought this could be useful to base my animating on. I decided to draw two faces and compare them. I drew one face looking as if the person is only smiling with their mouth and I drew the second to be more detailed around the eyes and cheeks. To me the second face seemed to be a more realistic face and so I thought I could do the same with two characters.

Once again I used the Max rig from the 11 Second Club and animated one character to smile with just their mouth and with the other I made a number of parts move for example the mouth, eyes and eyebrows. I assumed that the second character would be more realistic but after showing it in tutorial I learnt that people thought the first looked more genuine. They found that the second character looked as if they were grimacing rather than smiling.

From this I realised that I had animated the second character too much and so he ended up looking strange and not portraying the emotion I meant him to. This showed me that there is a limit on how much you animate a character if you want them to be believable.

I think I have learnt that you do use various parts of the face but that does not mean I have to animate each part of the face fully, for example lift the eyebrows right up as it makes the character look strange. So it was not technically a good animation, but I learnt a lot from it as an artefact and I think it would be useful to explore this more and build upon what I have learnt in another artefact.

ARTEFACT 3

For my third artefact I wanted to build upon what I found out with my second artefact and so created an artefact which looked at keeping animating simple. With this I looked at a scene from 'Snow White' where the dwarves are mourning the death of Snow White as it is a good example of how to keep the amount of movement low, but still show a deep sense of sadness in the characters.

From my research I learnt that animators base their characters movements on how real people move, but exaggerate these movements slightly. This is because a person may stay very still when they are sad but if you had your character do this it would end up looking like a lifeless object so I also wanted to take this into account with my artefact.

With the Max rig again I wanted to show him expressing sadness and so using the Snow White scene really helped. In the scene the dwarves stand still and just sniff occassionally or wipe away a tear so I decided to make my character wipe away a tear and sigh. I really had to think about keeping things simple yet having realistic movements that people do when they are sad.

I think that I managed to create an effective artefact but it can be improved technically, for example the arm movement could be smoother and the shoulders could move slightly in a natural way. I believe that it could be useful to look at other types of references for example I could look at scenes from films that aren't animated as then I would learn acting techniques in more depth as well. So I am quite happy with this artefact I learnt from the previous one to create this and I think it has turned out well and shows a believable character.

ARTEFACT 4

My fourth artefact was created to see if using an acting reference created a more realistic character, in the sense of emotion and personality. For this I used a clip from the film 'The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford'. In this clip the character is tryin to come to terms with the fact he has to kill Jesse James and it is a good example of how to act a thought process. With this I thought I could animate my character to do similar movements to the actor in the clip and therefore get an effective animation.

By using a reference it made it a lot easier to create an animation as I did not have to worry about how I could make the character move in the right way, as I could just copy the movements of the actor. I think the character moved more realistically and the emotion he was portraying seemed to be believable. I thought that if people could relate to the actor and empathise with him, then people would feel the same with towards my character.

I decided to compare this artefact with my first one to see if there was a significant difference. I personally thought that the animation was technically better, and the way the character moves is more realistic but I wanted to see if people preferred this character to the one in my first artefact without being told what was different about them. If people did prefer the artefact based on a reference then it would prove that using a reference does work. From this I found out that people preferred the character in my fourth artefact and when asked why they said that the first character seemed to move like a robot.

I think I could improve this artefact by changing the movements slightly so that i am influenced by the reference rather than just copying it. It may be interesting to experiment with other emotions and see if I can find other acting references which portray different emotions so that I can understand how to act out a variety of emotions.

ARTEFACT 5

With my fifth artefact I did not want to create an animation, I wanted to see if there was a good example of what I am researching in to, in the industry today. I thought I would it would be best to use an animated film as this would match with my research question, but I came across a platform game that seemed to tick all the boxes. This was because it had cinematics (or cut-scenes) in it which are used to advance the plot, strengthen characters and various other things.

With these cinematics I felt that you got a clear idea of who the characters were and their personalities. There were also times when they showed emotions and you could relate to them, even though what was happening to them was not realistic, for example being attacked by zombies.

It also made me think about having characters that not only behave realistically but look realistic too. The characters in this game do look like people, but you can still see that it isn't real. I thought this was good because it makes something that is not real still believable. This led me to look in to the theory of uncanny valley where it is believed that the more realistic looking an animated character becomes, the less empathy we feel for it.

I first wanted to take the video and edit it in premier to show the particular parts I wanted to examine but there was not a way to get hold of the video to do this so I collected screen shots of various moments which I thought were good. I think this has made my artefact not as clear as it could have been and if I were to do it again I would perhaps see if I could get hold of the cinematics so that I could emphasise certain bits better.