Week 1 - Performance Study

 We began this week's class with an introduction to performance capture and the differences between performance and motion capture. This semester's assignment will require us to think much more about facial expressions, intention of movement, and the emotions of the actors and what they are trying to convey.

I was assigned the frame range 1673-1940 (roughly 10 seconds) using the female character 'Miri'. I imported the sequence into a browser application called Syncsketch which I have utilised in the past to scrub through frames of a sequence to annotate and identify key moments and poses. It's fantastic for animation studies and I highly recommend. From here I was able to begin studying the performance details and make notes on the specific frames that key actions take place. My notes are linked on the Syncsketch page attached on this post.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/YzhiOGM0NmEw/?offlineMode=1#/27659610/28720942/f_1729

In this scene Miri is spilling the beans that her last words to the victim were "Fuck off and die". She appears nervous at the beginning and extremely hesitant to confess. She tries to hold back but the words tumble out and she appears visibly panicked. She only blinks a few times and holds long, unbroken stares just out of the eye contact of the other actor. There is the feeling of "Oh dear God this looks terrible, I'm in so much trouble even if I didn't do it", which she verbalizes to the officer as the allocated frames cuts her off.

This was a difficult task. I really struggle understanding facial expressions so trying to figure out the emotions behind the faces was hard, but breaking down the face into the brows, eyes, and bottom of the face was helpful advice. It's certainly one of the more expressive parts of the scene, so I know I will need to push those expressions to get the feelings across.

The body language, thankfully, is mostly in the arms. She doesn't really move her feet or make any big sweeping motions, though she spends a few seconds tapping her hand and making a tutting/telling off hand motion near the end. I hope this will give me a bit more time to focus on the face as a result. After all, that is the focus.