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.