Term 4 Week 7: Animating facial expressions

This weeks lectures is hosted by Victor Navone from Pixar. We looked at how to design facial expressions taking into account the anatomy of the face and understand how the face works. It's important to get a line a of action through the face and make sure the brow line, eye line and mouth line are generally offset from each other. It's also important to avoid symmetry in the face as this will reduce realism and interest. We also looked at how to get from one expression to another. We want to avoid going from pose a to pose b and break the action down with a pose 'X' in the middle - this will make facial expressions feel organic as they move from one to another. The breakdown pose can be used to emphasize the change so if we have a mouth going from a smile to a sad shape we could put the breakdown in a larger smile and lifted more toward the nose - this would pull the mouth up and exaggerate the smile before dropping into a sad shape and would really add punch to the change.

For my assignment this week I blocked out my shot: