Research Project Artefact Concepts

With my research project I have been considering my first two artefacts to produce. The main factor I want to focus on with these is the conveyance of emotions from a character, solely using body dynamics.

Looking at existing examples that focus on this concept such as the ‘Animation Mentor’ courses that have character posing as one of the lessons, producing strong, static poses conveying an emotion effectively as well as a research paper looking into the perception of emotions through static postures (http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/D.Romano/ShaaraniRomanoACII07.pdf), I intend to produce my first artefact following on this line of static poses, feeling it to be a good starting point on understanding the basic elements of body dynamics.

My first artefact will consist of a series of images having a simple character, lacking a face to focus purely on the pose, being set into a variety of poses to convey different emotions. To get strong results I will mainly focus on key emotions e.g. happiness, sadness, anger, fear, but also include other more vague emotions to see how effective it can be at conveying these.

Some examples of static poses produced from the Animation Mentor Courses.

In terms of my second artefact I will want to evolve my original concept of conveying emotions through static poses into an animated form which will allow me to gain an understanding of how motion aids in giving of different emotions and also compare this with the effectiveness of how well they are conveyed in a static form.

This artefact will follow a similar vein as my first in producing a number short scenes each intent on conveying an emotion, again focusing on much more common emotions whilst also including less obvious ones.

I feel like the combination of these two artefacts shall be useful in understanding the effectiveness of body dynamics in how much they can be used to convey a character and their feelings to an audience as well as look at if the form in which they are placed alters the effectiveness of this.