My fourth artefact involves a character performance using no dialogue, sound or cinematography. Therefore the story telling was completely up to myself and how I portrayed this to capture my character’s inner feelings with the audience.

When planning what my character was going to do and it’s back story, I researched some existing pantomime character animations to see how they express body language without sound. I found that the acting choices for doing a character performance without dialogue are even more important to be able to capture the audience, as the audience is basing it solely on the animated performance.

After research and planning I decided again, to animate a more subtle and emotional scene involving a young girl that see’s a letter on the table, goes over to read the letter and then shows her final reaction. I feel this was going to work well due to the build up through the story telling. The audience will be waiting to know what her reaction is going to be after reading the letter.

Following on from subtext and blinks, I felt this gave me a huge opportunity to expand on these within this Artefact.  After reading a quote from Shawn Kelly “When we’re having an idea, or when we’re switching from one emotion to another, or when we’re realising something. Those are the gold-mines in terms of blinks – that’s when a perfectly placed blink will take a scene from being merely ‘good’ and make it ‘great’.” (Shawn Kelly, 2009) it made me focus on my character’s big change of emotion during the scene, which is where this quote and blinking becomes vital.

For this particular Artefact I decided to act out the scene myself as a reference. As spoken about in my research document. This was good to focus on the natural movements that I made and improved my skills when animating the scene. In the focus group I showed the animation with my reference next to it and then another time without it. 

The overall feedback from the audience was good and they all felt the emotion I was trying to put portray. Although there was a little debate on what the letter was, some people thought it was a University acceptance letter and a couple of others thought it was a love letter. When writing a description for the background of the character, it was actually a University acceptance letter. However, either way everyone connected with the character in the same way.

Even so the audience felt the emotion they mentioned a few things about the poses and animating throughout the scene. The hands didn’t seem very natural, the head was posed quite vertical and some of the poses within the reference weren’t used as well as they could have been, such as the characters elbows were sticking out when mine in the reference wasn’t. However, they thought some of the acting choices worked well, when she holds the letter to where her heart is at the end means that the letter means something strongly to her.

With my findings for this Artefact I thought it would be great to expand it as my fifth Artefact by experimenting with sound and cinematography. I therefore took another pass at this Artefact which is the one shown above. I feel my conclusion on my final Artefact will determine whether sound can enhance the connection between the character’s emotions and audience. 

My third Artefact explored using blinks to convey emotion depending on the emotional state in which the character is feeling. Through further research into the topic, I came across some questions that are useful to ask yourself before delving into blinks knowing nothing about them. A couple of these were what is my character’s emotional state right now? What are they reacting to? How do I blink when I feel that way? Etc. If a character is sad, nervous or shy then he/she/it will blink more and if a character is angry, curious or bored then he/she/it will blink less. I also studied how to key frame a basic blink and an organic blink to see the differences between the two. After this knowledge and questions it was easier to be able observe people to see how their blinking reacted in the certain situations. For this Artefact, I chose a clip from ‘A Disquiet Follows my Soul (2009)’, I felt it had a lot of potential for expressing the character’s eye, as it is quite sad, she’s confused and she’s also talking about death. I felt it’s a clip for a strong subtle facial animation with less body language.

When speaking about more blinks due to sadness and less blinks due to being angry. I believed I would gain a better understanding and response from the audience if I used a more emotional clip, as there are more blinks to be used which enables me to test my timing and spacing when capturing the emotion. It becomes more of a challenge than it would be with animating an angry character with less blinks.

The feedback from the audience was strong in terms of the blinking relating to the characters emotional state. They believed the character and her thought process behind the dialogue and the amount and timing of the blinks worked along with the dialogue. Also, when she looks up, it shows a sign of hope in how she is feeling and then bringing her head back down shows the lack of confidence she has.  In term of animation, they mentioned that her head and shoulders were too stiff and in the beginning of the screen there wasn’t enough movement. Overall they thought the animating and subtleties were good quality and they could see the improvements in my animating skills throughout each Artefact, which was really pleasing.  

I found that there are certain factors with blinking such as when the head turns it can add anticipation. They can also add life to a scene if the character is looking to ‘dead’. But most importantly is the thought process and the change of thought is to why we blink. After my experimenting, research and findings from subtext and blinks, I would like to create my next Artefact using no dialogue, sound or cinematography to capture interior monologue. 

Through relating back to my research document  and studying further reading into subtext I noticed an interesting clip in the ‘Incredibles, 2004’ animated feature film. At the beginning when Mr Incredible is being interviewed he says ‘who enjoys the pressures of being super’. Through subtext, Mr Incredibles body language says something completely different than to his dialogue. He shows that he actually does enjoy the pressures of being super. This is something that has inspired me, by noticing subtext within acting films and clips than I didn’t before I researched further.

I chose a clip from the Requiem for a Dream, 2000. I felt as though the subtleties in what the character is saying could be used well to express subtext.

I decided to show the clip without the dialogue being played to see whether the audience still connected to the character the same.  As quoted ‘If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.’ (Alfred Hitchcock, 2012) I feel this was something vital to test whist studying the use of subtext. 

The feedback from the clip without dialogue was quite positive. They could sense that she was upset and quite annoyed from her facials expression and mainly her body language looking down, not really looking up that were good acting choices to portray what she was feeling. From this I showed the same audience the scene with the dialogue to see whether they felt the same.

The feedback from my focus group was positive, meaning the animation seems to be animated a lot better than my first Artefact. In my original pass at this animation the focus group mentioned that there wasn’t enough movement in her hips, especially when she moved her hands to left and right. There should still be some twist within the lower body when she makes these gestures. The group also pointed out that the movement of her hand gestures should be on particular words of the dialogue, such as ‘bed’ and ‘dishes’. As shown in the Artefact above, I improved what was discussed and also added other extra subtleties.

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n terms of feedback for the overall subtext within the performance, the audience seem well connected with the character’s inner feelings and thought process, showing that she is upset, annoyed and lonely. They felt the same yet more emotion when the dialogue was heard. This feedback also included people with no studied animation background. However, I felt that there wasn’t enough contrast between the dialogue and the thought process, like in the ‘Incredibles, 2004’ clip I mentioned above.  I feel I could have used operative words to capture a stronger subtext performance, though the audience still believed it portrayed a good experiment of subtext.

Following on from this Artefact, I thought this would be a great opportunity to continue the feedback and research to start my next Artefact about blinking. As Shawn Kelly says “If the body is 90% of the acting performance, the eyes are 90% of the facial performance. After considering what the body will be doing, the next most important thing is definitely your eye performance.”(Shawn Kelly, 2009).  I feel this is a strong piece of research to discover, as the main use of blinking is through a character’s thought process.