Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Acting for Animators
I got to attend a fairly cool class last night, hosted by Ed Hooks.
I guess this guy has taught at a lot of cool places, like London, Germany, and Disney.
While it was interesting in that I always enjoy a good, healthy discussion about the basics of acting and how it applies to animation, the class could have been tailored a lot more towards game animation and physical acting. Since 3d game animation doesn't do facial at the same time as the actual game animation, you can't really "act" or "emote" in the face, and have to convey all of your emotion through physical gestures and poses.
But the highlight of the class was getting to talk about Paul Ekman's studies on facial movement and what it tells about the human being. It's called FACS (Facial Action Coding System). I recall seeing a documentary on Discovery or TLC that had the FBI talking about his system of recording "micro expressions" on videotape during an interview with someone, and using those micro expressions to show when someone's lying.
Very cool stuff.
