Ratatouille animation test

hahahahahaaaaa…..

ahahahahahahaahahahah

This looks great and very promising

Dr. Morris on Shortfall signals

“A shortfall signal is one that fails to reach its usual level of intensity. In some ways, it falls short of the expected.

The On-Off smile is an obvious example. This is a smile that flashes quickly onto an otherwise immobile face and then, just as quickly, vanishes again. The normal smile, in contrast, takes fractionally longer to grow to full strength and to fade away again. Sometime, when friends meet in the street, they can still be seen smiling long after they have actually passed eachother. But the On-Off smile decays with lightning speed the moment the smiler’s face is no longer the focus of attention. Such smiles often last only a second and can be easily converted into insults by switching the smile on and then off while still in view”.

On a performer trying to fake a smile:

“To get it right he must copy all the elements of the smile to the appropriate degree. This means that he must stretch his lips, raise his mouth corners, and adjust the rest of his face, all to the correct strength in relation to one another, and for the correct length of time in relation to their intensity. Also the smile must grow on his face and fade away at the correct rate for the particular strength of expression”.

“If you watch foreigners that don’t go abroad very often, there is one noticable thing. When you watch these people as they engage in a conversation with their foreign-hosts, there is a curious phenomenon. Realizing that they have lost the subtle nuances of their home-town interactions. They avoid the danger of accidentally and unintended shortfall-signalling by employing a device that is both crude and effective….they over-exagerate EVERYTHING…”

Hehe, that last one’s funny cause it’s true! :).
Next up, Status displays!

Dr. Morris on Non-verbal leakage

This is hands down one of the coolest parts in the book so far. It deals with our body language when you’re lying, but you don’t want other to know about it! How does our body give us away? What physical change does our body go through and how does our behaviour change from our normal non-lying behaviour. I think it’s safe to say thought, that these changes don’t only apply to lying. Overall I feel that these changes in behaviour have more to do with your stresslevel and how you deal with it.

They did a test where they had nurses watch an operation that was pretty brutal and bloody, but the nurses’ job was to convince the other patients (who were about to undergo the same operation) that it wasn’t bloody at all, hence…lie to them. These are some of the main points they came up with.

1. “When lying, the nurses decreased the level of simple gesticulation they made with their hands. The gestures they normally use to emphasize a verbal statement – to drive home a point, or to underline an important moment – were significantly reduced.”

The reasons for this is interesting. When we normally talk, we gesticulate without knowing, we have no knowledgeable control over our hands as we are talking. So when we are lying we are trying to be the least suspicious as possible, we consciously keep our hands still, heaven forbid should they make any wrong move without our knowning! So, the stress-level rises, we try to grasp control of the situation by not moving suspiciously.

2. “When lying, the nurses increased the number of hand-to-face contacts. We all touch our faces from time to time in conversation, but the number of times these gestures are performed rises dramatically during moments of deception”.

3. “when lying, the nurses showed an increase in the number of body-shifts they made as they spoke. A child who squirms in his chair is obviously dying to escape and any parent recognizes these symptoms of restlessness immediatly. In adults they are reduced and surpressed -again because they are so obviously signs of unease – but they do not vanish.”

“When a mood change seeks expression, it can expect to be registered by the alteration of the set of facial-muscles in much less than a second. The counter-message from the brain, telling the face to ‘shut-up’, often fails to catch up with the primary mood-change message. The result is that a facial expression begins and then, a split second later, is cancelled by the counter-message. What happens on the face during the split-second delay is a tiny, fleeting hint of an expression.”

“It has long been known that the two hemispheres of the human brain have, during the course of evolution, become specialized in certain ways. The left hemisphere has become the ‘computer brain’ favouring rational, logical, analytical, linguistic thinking, while the right hemisphere has become the ‘intuitive brain’ favouring spacial and creative thinking. It follows from this that the left side of the brain is more active when someone is telling the truth, using stored facts and figures to give an honest reply to a question, while the right side of the brain is more active when lying, using the individual’s creative ability to fantasize a fictitious reply.  This specialization of the two hemispheres influences the direction in which speakers look as they give their honest or dishonest replies to questions. Because each side of the brain controls attention to the “opposite” side of the visual field, the speaker tends to gaze to their right when telling the factual truth, or to their left when inventing imaginative fictions. This means that, as we look at the speaker’s face, we see the eyes move to the right when a lie is being told.”

“Other visual clues to deception include an unnatural increase in the amount of eye contact. The liar tries to avoid the well-known ‘shifty-eyed’ response and over-compensates. In a similar way, liars are often aware that squirming in your seat when lying is a childlike give-away, so they sit very still and appear over-composed. When counter-acting the more obvious signs of deceptio, the liar may swing the pendulum of body-language too far in the opposite direction. But this more sophisticated error can be just as revealing.”

Animated characters do have a life you know!

A lot of animation tests that I come across on the web have one thing in common…characters without a personal life! Think about it, is your character waiting to be animated by you? probably not, if you want your character to be believable, you can’t just have him standing there, delivering a line or showing an emotion. 9 times out of 10 your character was doing something BEFORE your shot, or is going to be doing something AFTER your shot, so why the heck interrupt his actions just to deliver your line?

Imagine the following. You’re writing on a piece of paper, and someone asks you a question. Are you seriously going to drop what you’re doing, face the other person to answer his question, and then pick up where you left off after the other guy is gone?? I don’t think so, you’ll probably continue writing WHILE answering the question. It might not be the most polite thing to do, so you have to look at it in context of course. Is this guy your superior, peer or subordinate? it all depends. So I guess what i’m trying to say is, multitasking is something we do in ordinary life, so why should animation be any different? You’re breathing life into a character, but that doesn’t mean it starts and ends with your scene. They have a life, let them live it!

from the top of my head, check out the scene in the incredibles where Helen is washing Jack Jack in the sink while calling Bob at work. She doesn’t stop washing the baby every time she delivers a line, she’s doing 2 things at once!

I may be stating the obvious here, it’s just something that bothered me while looking at some random animation bits.

Dr. Morris on body contact tie-signs

  a body contact tie-sign is displayed whenever a social bond between two people expresses itself in the form of physical touching of one by the other.There are 14 main groups in which we can divide body contact tie signs…I’ll go over the ones that I found most interesting.

1: The hand Shake

“The strength of the tie-to-be or the tie-that-was is expressed in how far beyond the normal intensity of the hand shake the action goes.  To express strong feeling the shaker must go beyond what is formally expected. The most common handshake amplifier is the left-hand-squeeze.  As the formal right hands meet, the left hand comes forward, either to clasp the already clasped right hands, or the right arm, or the shoulder. “

It might even go further where the left arm goes around the back of the other person, causing an embrace.

“Even where the shakers are by personal style non-embracers, there is still a perceptible body leaning towards each other – tell tale, small intention movements of embracing that can go no further.”

Of course,  this stuff only applies to two people that mutually want to meet eachother.  Someone who doesn’t want to meet the other person, but is forced to do so, will most likely not lean toward his greeter.  Imagine some pompous king who meets a diseased person.  The king might be revolted by this person and lean back, away from the other person, away from his disease!  While the opposite might happen with the diseased one, he will most likely WANT to meet the king, and in fact lean forward quite a bit, in his enthusiasm he might even try to grasp the kings elbow or even try to embrace him.

2:  The body guide

Imagine a student who is being sent to the principals office.  He knocks on the door, the principal opens the door and sees the student.  The principal immediatly realises that this kid has done something wrong, putting the principal in the dominant position (even more so than he was before)  He gently guides the student into his office by guiding him along with his hand on his back.

“It is in fact, one of the mild ways in which a host expresses his/her dominance of his/her guests who are momentarily in a weakened position.”

“used unwisely, it can quickly become pompous and patronizing!”. 

3: The pat

This is a kind of half-embrace, in which the hand alone stands in for a full-body embrace.

“Children can be patted on almost any part of the body, but with adults it has to be restrained to the arm, shoulder, back or hand.  If it is to be neutral, pats on adults’ head, buttocks, thighs or knees are either condescending or sexual.”

“adult head pats are usually considered rather mocking.”

4: The arm link

“In the majority of cases it is the female who hooks her hand through the bent arm of the male, as if for support and protection.”

“A minor version of it, the hand on shoulder, is sometimes preferred and is typical of situations where one male is busily persuading or explaining.  It enables him to limit the movements of his companion and keep him within close proximity, to receive the full impact of the verbal delivery.”

5: The kiss

The kiss is usually only performed in public by younger couples.  Which makes sence, since they are still getting to know eachother, therefor making more obvious and exaggerated tie-signs.

“The only occasions when an older-couple will behave like this in public are when they are parting for a long separation, or meeting after one, or have just come through some powerfull emotional experience together.  A triumph, a disaster, or an escape from danger”.

“Other kinds of kisses can be scaled by how low or how high they are on the body.  These are the status kisses.  Starting at the top of the head with the parental kiss down onto the child’s crown region.  This is a dominant kiss and when performed by one adult to another, it usually carries a mock-parental message.”

 “Lower down the body, the hand kiss reflects an appropriatly lower-status.  It is the kiss of reverence or formal deference and its subordinate message is boosted by the bow needed to carry it out.  In earlier days, where a female had to be hand-kissed even by dominant males, the top-males avoided the bow by bringing the hand up to their mouths.”

6: The hand to head

“To allow one to come close to and touch the other’s head requires a strong personal bond of trust between the toucher and the one being touched.  Go to touch a stranger’s arm and he will feel little alarm, go to touch his head and he immediatly becomes defensive.”

Dr. Morris on Tie Signs

A Tie-sign is any action which indicates the existence of a personal relationship, anything someone might do to show (concious or unconcious) to show that there is a social connection between him and someone else.

“The striking overall feature of the change between initial tie-signs (tie-signs that are made by people who have just met) and long term tie-signs, is that the members who have known eachother longer, start to act more and more like strangers”

Quite true! He goes on with an anecdote about 3 couples in the park sitting on 3 seperate benches. 1 was an elderly couple, another couple were two people in their fourties, the third couple were two teenagers. You could see very clearly who had known eachother longer. The young couple only have eye for eachother, while the elderly couple hardly says anything or even looks at eachother :).
When people meet at first, they will be overly courteous and friendly, trying to suck in every bit of information about the person they have just met! The longer you know eachother, the less there is to know. Makes you think about monogamy doesn’t it?
Then again, the better you know someone, the less you have to do to communicate with that person.

“The married couple who are about to leave a social gathering can synchronize their leave-taking by an almost imperceptible exchange of glances. Or, a flicker of a smile lasting a fraction of a second, on the faces of a pair of old friends as they look across a room at eachother, is sufficient to communicate a shared reaction!”

Surviving the blind eye

I don’t know if that’s the “correct” term for this phenomenon, but I describe it as the “blind eye”. It’s that point in time where you lose all critical view on the piece that you have been working on for the past umph-teen hours. You know, the feeling that you just can’t figure out what’s wrong with your piece of animation. Or even worse, you LIKE your piece, but your co-workers or anybody else isn’t feeling too hot about it. THAT is nerve wrecking.
The minute you start to lose your critical eye, you’re done for.

The best thing to do then is just step away from the piece visually, make sure you can’t see it anymore. Think about something else, anything BUT the piece. Then go back to your desk and give it a fresh look. 9 times out of 10, the stuff that needs work will stick out like a sore thumb! If it doesn’t, you’re still too emotionally connected to the piece, and (if you have that luxury) you need to take a longer break from it. Have people critique it, give you their opinions, and don’t try to be too passionate about your ideas… If they can’t see what you want to show in that scene, it’s probably NOT their fault, it’s yours!

I wanted to post about this since I had one of the worst cases of blind-eye EVER to strike mankind!

This is the piece as I approved it.
This is the piece as approved after revisions and fixes.

As you can see, the first version has a lot of glitches, pops and jerks…YUCKIE! After the revisions it looks a lot better in my opinion, the moves are clearer, the arcs are better, a lot less of the popping going on. Overall, it’s been a good lesson for me. Never trust your own eye after spending more than 3 days on the same piece!

CGsociety feature :)

Woopie, we got featured on CGsociety

Dr. Morris on Postural echo’s…

Good stuff just keeps coming in this book.

“When two friends meet and talk informally they usually adopt similar body postures. If they are particularly friendly and share the same attitude to the subject being discussed, then the position of their bodies are likely to become even more alike, to the point where they virtually become carbon copies of eachother.”

“More surprising is the fact that they frequently synchronize their movements as they talk. When one uncrosses his legs, the other soon follows suit, and when one leans back a little, so does his companion.”

About disputing in group.

“If three of the group are disputing with the other four, the members of each sub-group will tend to match their body postures but keep distinct from the other sub-group. On occasion, it is even possible to predict that one of them is changing sides before he has declared his change of heart verbally, because his body will start to blend with the postures of the members of the opposing team.”

This stuff is soooooo cool…
Well I think it is!

The pigs were plugged!

weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!