Week 4 eyes and brows

Demo: copying animation from root to spine. Adding Head nods. Beginning to rough out the gestures.

Demo: adding eyes and brows.

Once you get a pass with the eye movements, the characters will start to come to life. I do this as early on in the animation as possible, once I start roughing out the gestures. I find it difficult to visualize the performance until I get the eye direction in there. Most of the information about what a person is trying to communicate is in the brows and eyes.

Do a pass with the eye movements.

Go through your entire animation, look for key moments of emotional change that are communicated through the brows. Key the upper and lower eyelids with the brows. Keep the keys together.

Working from the root outwards ....

Note from SIGGRAPH 2009 :

A time honored, classic technique used in animation is pose-to-pose. Landreth argued that humans don't actually move "pose to pose" so already the animator is setting up the characters in unrealistic circumstances. In The Spine, Landreth's featured short at this year's Siggraph, he was trying to push the boundaries of realism in animation even further. To do this, the animators were actually told not to use a dope sheet when planning their animation, which prevented the use of "posing." Instead, the animators were encouraged to take an "inside-out" approach when defining the character's movements. He suggested that they "inhabit the souls of the characters" and "do the motions to get into the body."

- Chris Landreth

Landreth then commented on the importance of gestures in animation. “Doing nothing excellently” is important to keeping your characters real. In the mid-60s, Andy Warhol did a series of “screen-tests” in which he sat a person in a chair and told them to “do nothing.” What emerged from these tests were incredibly engaging scenes that seem to have such weight and action in very subtle movements. Bob Dylan’s screen-test was particularly inspiring to Landreth’s study of realism. “Allow your characters to just simply exist.”