Research

The character will be playing computer games whilst looking at a television, so to see what it looks like from a different perspective I recorded myself playing computer games to see what I did whilst I played.

The footage shows the little things that I do during gameplay which has given me a few ideas of things to add to my character animation such as body language and some of the gestures I have.

I also looked at some videos on YouTube to see if there was anything on anger, laughter & happiness and tried to find a video of different types of human emotions.

Anger Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wJl9ciywAA Anger Video

Laughter & Happiness Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y8fKw9WBZE

Human Emotions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrUfxn3eXoQ

These videos show the different types of human emotion I want to include in the animation as the character is going to be happy, angry, and a mixture of the emotions from the 3rd video.

The human emotion video is very useful as it shows you what facial parts move for different types of expression.

When looking for different types of facial expressions I found an image of a man doing lots of different facial expressions.

This shows the ways in which I could make my character more expressive when playing his games such as the look of fear in the bottom left, the sad face 5th picture at the bottom and the last image for happiness.

Figure 1. Image of Facial Expressions[1]

I also researched for more types of expression and I found images for different expressions that I wanted to use, Anger, Happiness and Sadness.

These images are the same images that are used in the YouTube (Human Emotion) video showing what areas of the face move when people make the expressions.

Figure 2. Image showing how people express Anger [2]

Figure 3. Image showing how people express Happiness [2]

Figure 4. Image showing how people express Sadness [2]

The images could be used to help create the expressions of Billy, the topology on the characters face will help me to manipulate the face to express the expressions.
When I created the head for the character I made sure that the topology was correct to the face so that when moving areas of the face the movements would be as close to the real thing as possible.

Images taken from:

[1] http://www.autismspot.com/tags/Spot-Content-Tags/facial-expression

[2] http://empathicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/02/microexpressions-tool-for-empathy.html