Artefact 5.2

This is an extension of Artefact 5 that continues to improve the quality of the animation by exaggerating the movement of the head even further.

Artefact 2-3 Comparison Images

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Do you see what he sees?

This final artefact has been the most useful artefact created during this research project because of the drastic improvement it has shown to the quality of the performance seen in Artefact 4. During the creation of Artefact 5, the original Bill Hicks scene was analysed to help understand the different facial expressions that were used in conjunction with specific words. Whilst studying this footage it became apparent that Hicks has a very unique face and way of speaking. He often speaks out of one side of his mouth and his lips are very exaggerative when articulating certain words. All of these observations helped to improve the performance of the digital character being worked on; they enabled added layers of complexity within the character’s face that instilled a greater depth to the character that weren’t seen in Artefact 4.
This artefact is the best example that has been created during this research project; it shows how using reference material can enhance the authenticity of a performance of a digital character, which was what the initial purpose of the research aimed to show. Although this artefact is a great improvement to previous artefacts, there is still room for improvement. In certain areas, the digital performance leans on the original too much; merely mimicking a real-life performance is not enough in the digital realm, a digital character must go further and exaggerate certain actions in order to accommodate for the obvious physical limitations.
Furthermore, a digital performance is always limited in some way by the character’s rig and specific model. There are parts of Hicks’s original performance that simply could not be replicated using the Morpheus rig because of how it has been put together. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of the Morpheus rig; it is merely a reality that must be acknowledged. Again, it was not the intention of this research to directly mimic the actions of the real-life performer, rather to understand the motions in that performance and translate them in a way that fits the character being animated. If someone actually wanted to mimic the exact actions of a real person, they would either have to model and rig a character with that in mind, or use state of the art motion capture technology, which would capture the minute details of a particular person. However, even motion capture has its limitations and it cannot be solely relied upon. Animators are often needed to tweak and alter certain parts of the capture footage.

Artefact 4

For this artefact the Morpheus rig has been used to create a new performance, focusing on facial animation. Although the Max rig has been a useful tool in experimenting with general animation, the facial controllers are somewhat limiting compared to the Morpheus rig. This rig offers much more control over specific areas of the face and has helped craft a new animation with the help of a new audio clip from Bill Hicks’s stand-up comedy routine ‘Relentless’.

Artefact 4 is a decent attempt at conveying the feelings behind Hicks’s words but even when just concentrating on the motion of the face, having a visual reference would greatly improve the performance. It is difficult to imagine specific facial expressions and combine them in a cohesive way that looks convincing to an audience. The lip-synching of the mouth is quite rigid and somewhat robotic; this area specifically deserves more attention. This artefact has helped to show the difficulties that come with animating a person’s face with only an audio clip for context.

There will be much to improve in Artefact 5, when the original scene will be analysed so that a better understanding of the tone and emotions that Hicks displays on his face can be articulated onto the digital character; however, the digital character needs to maintain a certain level of individuality and not become merely a clone of the original performance.

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Artefact 3

As was mentioned in the last rationale, Artefact 3 is an attempt to improve the performance that was created in Artefact 1. Although this artefact should look familiar, it is clear that there has been a noticeable upgrade to the movement and natural flow of the character’s performance, compared to that of Artefact 1. There are several factors to analyse in order to describe what has changed and, why each has improved the piece.

Firstly it is important to state that all of the key frame animation for the main body parts was completely scrapped from Artefact 1 and re-animated from scratch. The only animation that was maintained was the facial animation. This stayed largely the same apart from a few minor touches to the eye movement that will be mentioned later. To begin with, the focus was aimed at the initial steps that Woody Allen’s character takes at the beginning of the scene. In Artefact 1, movement of the legs was largely ignored and the animation began with the character in a static position. This was changed in Artefact 3 so that the animation begins with the character moving his body and turning to face the other person, like Allen does in the real scene. Looking back at Artefact 1, this is a vast improvement and negates the feeling that the character is stuck to the floor and can only move his upper body.

The next element of the performance that needed improvement was the use of the character’s arms. In Artefact 1, the character only uses one of his arms to express himself, and the other is quite lifeless. This is rectified in Artefact 3 by focusing on the key poses of Allen’s character in the original scene and translating those poses onto the digital character being animated. The first half of the scene shows Allen holding both of his arms out in front of him as he explains his distress to the other character, and then in the second half we see him move one of his hands to his hip as he reaches the climax of his verbal outburst. Artefact 3 incorporates both of these key elements of Allen’s performance, which helps to convey the emotional distress, felt by him. Reference to the source material was essential in making this improvement and helps to strengthen the view that live-action reference material can elevate the quality of an animated performance.

Other areas that were developed include; head and waist motion. Both areas, especially the movement of the character’s head have been improved to accommodate the feelings that Allen’s character is evoking through his speech. Attention to the movement of the hips has allowed for a more free flowing performance; the hips are moving as the character shifts his weight to accommodate his hand gestures. Lastly, and as was mentioned earlier, the eye-movement has been tweaked after advice from a research tutor. There are sections of the animation where the character looks away into space whilst he is thinking what to say. In Artefact 1 when the character did this, his eyes would just look to the side, at normal eye-level. The research tutor pointed out that when people look away to think what to say next, they don’t look straight ahead, they usually look down or sometimes up and to the side. The latter had already been incorporated, but the former was missing from the performance in Artefact 1, however, this has been rectified in Artefact 3; there are moments where the character’s eyes look down as his head moves to the side. This seemingly minor alteration is a big improvement to the overall consistency of the performance as it expresses to the viewer that the character is really thinking about what he is saying and the words coming from his mouth are his words.

This artefact has shown what having a live-action source to refer to, can do to improve a digital character’s performance. It has been very helpful, as it has exposed important idiosyncrasies that every individual has, that mustn’t be overlooked when translating a real-life performance into the body of a digital character. However, it is important to reiterate that this exercise did not intend to recreate the exact personality of Allen’s character; rather it was to show that referring to living things can evolve the sincerity of a digital character past the point of relying solely on the animator’s knowledge of motion. Artefacts 1, 2 and 3 have concentrated on a full-body performance but Artefact 4 will focus on a new performance that specifically concentrates on the motion of the human face. With this in mind, a different rig will be utilised in order to animate the performance; the Max rig is a versatile rig for general bodily motion, but it is somewhat lacking in the facial department. For this reason, the Morpheus rig will be relied upon via Maya, which offers a wealth of controllers that enable a myriad of expressions that will be used to create a strong performance.

Artefact 2

The purpose of this artefact is to analyse the original scene from the film Manhattan, which was the basis for the animation I created for Artefact 1. Analysing the original footage will enable a better understanding of how the human body moves - whilst in a state of frustration and mild anger. This knowledge will help build towards Artefact 3, where the performance created for Artefact 1 will be re-animated. The aim is to compare Artefacts 1 and 3 and observe how the latter artefact has been refined and improved to express an increasingly believable performance.

After viewing the original scene several times and collecting images of the key poses found in the footage, time was spent referring to Disney’s 12 principles of animation, in order to find the most relevant areas to focus on. Disney’s fourth principle ‘Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose’ is crucially important because it describes two different approaches to animation. Pose to Pose is a methodical and largely pre-planned approach to animation, whereas Straight Ahead Action can be viewed as a more creative and unconstrained approach; ‘With Pose to Pose, there is clarity and strength. In Straight Ahead Action, there is spontaneity.’ (Thomas and Johnston, 1997) With this in mind, Straight Ahead Action appeared to be a more suitable approach to use for capturing the performance being analysed in this artefact. Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan uses very sporadic gestures, especially with his arms that fit nicely with the spontaneous method of Straight Ahead Action.

‘Arcs’ (Disney’s seventh principle) is another important area to focus on because the performance being analysed is that of a human being. ‘Very few organisms are capable of moves that have a mechanical in and out or up and down precision.’ (Thomas and Johnston, 1997) This is an important point because if the principle of Arcs is ignored, the performance will be robotic, lifeless and will fail to convince anyone to believe in it. Examples of Arcs can be found throughout Allen’s performance and will need to be incorporated into the animation for Artefact 3.

Finally, the third principle to make a point of is ‘Exaggeration’ (Disney’s tenth principle). Exaggeration is a very important part of animation because when an audience merely looks at a fictional character, they immediately understand that it is not real; it is only through the character’s actions that the illusion of life is created and the audience is forced to forget reality by becoming absorbed by the performance. The scene which is the focus here is already quite openly expressive and includes lots of gesture and movement, so in order to convey that same level of action through a digital character, the motion must be even more exaggerative. This is difficult to achieve largely because whilst animating, it becomes hard to maintain an objective view of the performance being created. There is always a worry that what you are doing is ‘too much’, or ‘over the-top’, similar feelings are illustrated by Dave Hand in ‘The Illusion of Life’ where he explains how Walt Disney continually criticised a particular piece of his work for not exaggerating enough (Thomas and Johnston, 1997).

Artefact 2 in part has been a method of preparation for my next artefact. The information discussed here will be applied to Artefact 3 in order to improve the performance seen in Artefact 1, with particular attention given to the three Disney principles mentioned earlier; as well as the repeated referral to the original footage. It should also be noted that the intention of Artefact 3 is not to mimic the original performance. Rather, to use the information and principles extracted from the footage together with the reading material, which can be found both here and in the main research essay, to create a new performance that has a realistic and believable personality of its own.

Artefact 1

To create this initial artefact a sound clip was used in order to aid the creation of a short character animation; the clip was taken from a famous film called ‘Manhattan’ starring Woody Allen. The purpose of this artefact was to demonstrate what could be achieved using a sound clip for reference whilst animating, combined with previous experience and knowledge of animation. The ‘Max rig’ was used to animate the character performing with the sound clip, which was very easy to work with.

The animation intended to represent a similar tone to that of the sound clip, which consisted of a man (Allen) arguing with another character in the scene. It is clear from the sound clip that he is distressed and upset with what he has recently learnt and is expressing his feelings to the other character in the scene. The facial animation was synched with the audio initially, focusing primarily on the mouth movements to begin with and continuing with the rest of the key facial features including the eyes, eyebrows and head movements.

After the face was correctly synched with the audio clip it was time to focus on the character’s body. It is important to note that throughout the animation process the ‘Straight Ahead Action’ methodology was followed in order to animate the rig, among other principles of animation. Particular attention was given to the arms and hands in order to create a more dramatic performance that would complement the tone of Allen’s voice in the sound clip; thus creating a more convincing character portrayal. Effort was made to animate the hands to gesture at appropriate times, flowing congruently with the pugnacious tone and rhythm of Allen’s words.

Artefact 1 has shown that a fairly convincing performance can be created using a small piece of reference material and an understanding of Disney’s principles of animation. Clearly there is much room for improvement and Artefact 2 will endeavour to help make improvement possible through the examination of the original video footage from the film Manhattan.

Artefact 1 (Incomplete)

Client Project - Design Work

Client Project - Storyboard 1st Draft