Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design & Professional Practice- Facial expressional

Character Design & Professional Practice-

Facial expressional

“The eyes are the windows to the soul, and how they are drawn expresses any number of emotions. Their size and position conveys something about your character: bigger eyes tend to give a sense of childishness or childlike wonder, smaller ones a sense of seriousness and depth, wide-set eyes gives a sense of oddity, while close-set eyes are often comic.”-Anima Boutique

Facial expressional are some of the most key things in creating a character everyone will love and understand. People need to understand what your character is thinking and feeling with small movements of their face. These are also some of the few things that are universally understood, this is important in an animation where the character cant talk or the animation is silent as it is one of the rare things that can be shown to people all over the world, and they will understand the emotions and words even though there is no sound. This is because even when the language is different, the expressions more often than not, stay similar enough for people to understand the context and in depth emotions a character can be portraying just with their face.

WALL-E was an amazing example of characters that say so much with so little, WALL-E had body movements and eye tilts to show how he was feeling and what he was thinking which proved extremely effective with him ending up being such a loved character by the audience, this is also shown by EVE who worked out even harder for the animators as he could only show two eye crescents of emotion. Yet they still managed to get her to be understood and loved.

Sadness with her eyes cast downward

Fear as he body is pulled in tight in fright         Wonder as he is captivated with the object he has found   

Another amazing classic character would be Gromit, with just eyebrows, they have been able to give him more effective emotions than some human characters have ever show. He has been revolutionary in understanding how people can read the smallest of eye, face and body movements and really let the animators understand how facial features can move such small amounts and say so much.

Here you can really see just how small amounts of changes can make his emotions look totally different. This really does show you how important the faces are and the facial features, as any changes in placement can change the whole look of the character and how sure small changes can have a very large effect.