“Anger”

Anger was the first emotion I chose to express due to its strength as a sentiment. To animate a believable expression of anger, I studied existing animations and film clips where the emotion of anger was expressed fluently. The problem I was confronted with was that even though anger is one of the strongest emotions in the world, it can be portrayed in many different ways. To conquer the issue of what is anger looks like on a person’s face, I started looking at nature as well. A dog starts to snarl and bear his teeth when he gets angry. I found that this is a facial expression that many humans mimic in their own anger. At this stage of my research it helped me a lot to take photographs of people displaying their own anger. I took it for granted that this is only a watered-down expression of their real angry faces, for anger is such a strong emotion and thus making it hard to be mimicked when not angry. However, taking the photographs gave me a lot of inspiration and help.

In addition, to be able to express anger correctly, I tested Osipa’s theory that the brow pinch is paramount to conveying emotion. With my first model, I had the problem that eyebrows were too “busy” with an untidy mesh to express a viable picture of the emotion “anger”. By optimizing the model’s mesh (removing 200,000 excess polys) the improved model both, expresses emotion better and received a much stronger and instant reaction from an audience than the previous model.

I personally found that such a complicated model will only get tidier and more expressive through practise and experience with animating models. With each and every animation I am doing I become more skilled, more efficient, more competent and quicker at optimizing a model and producing a believable creation with the synthesis of life. The expression of the emotion anger is working now, as can be seen in the following two pictures.

The Old Model (above)

The New Model (above)