Part 5: Personal project – research and storyboard overview

All websites mentioned in this post were accessed on 02 December 2015.

02 December, 2015. Slowly but surely we will have to get accustomed to the fact that the fight for our son’s future will remain foremost on the agenda for decades to come. The legal system works with agonising slowness and we have to take care that waiting won’t make us ill.

This is why I want to study, in my personal project animation, facial expressions connected with lying, based on Paul Ekman’s “Facial Action Coding System” (FACS). In order to detect lying it is necessary to learn to spot so-called micro expressions, which slip through attempts of a lying person to hide their true feelings ( http://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions/). Seven basic emotions are understood globally: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, surprise and happiness. In my project it is the emotion of fear, which the portrayed person is attempting to hide.

I had a look at several websites testing one’s ability to read a face correctly and I seem to be notoriously bad at it. This comes probably from having spent 30 years of my life not being able to look into peoples’ eyes because of a syndrome involving the neck (forgot the name), before being cured within minutes by an osteopath several years ago. I also – still, after all that has happened – tend to believe in people and what they say, so I spend less time looking people into the face than I probably should. Which meant that I had to doublecheck my idea of a face expressing fear. According to http://www.livescience.com/2608-face-fear-explained.html it is associated with a higher intake of air, a wider field of vision and increased visual tracking and is most readily identified by the wide open eyes (increased vigilance!). As listed by http://www.scienceofpeople.com/2013/09/guide-reading-microexpressions/ I also need to be aware of the following:

• brows raised and drawn together in a flat line
• forehead wrinkles centrally between brows, not across
• upper eyelid raised, lower lid tense and drawn up
• only upper eye white showing
• mouth open with lips slightly tensed and drawn back

My storyboard will thus run as follows:

1. Neutral portrait in daylight (either finished at the start or developing during the drawing)

2.Background gets dark (evening twilight), accident on a road occurs between the portrayed person in a car (to be identified by haircut, doctor’s work coat and tie) and a child walking on the road.

3. The driver stops briefly to look at the child lying on the road, then drives off into the darkness.

4. The portrait stays neutral during the incident, only the eyes move to look at it, then move back to very, very briefly make contact with the eyes of the spectator (by chance, as if the portrayed person did not expect an observer to be there), reveal the expression of fear behind the neutral face, then look straight on, i.e. past the edge of the paper in the direction the car left an instant ago.

5. The remaining scene in the background starts to dissolve, the charcoal moves towards the portrait and into the face to make it look hard.

Back soon with the sketchbook storyboard drawings.

Part 4, project 6, exercise 3: The face – portrait from memory or the imagination, stage 1 (preliminary thoughts and research)

All websites mentioned in this post were accessed on 22 November 2015.

22 November, 2015. It took me days to decide who to portray here. I find the idea behind the exercise fascinating. Earlier today I thought I would go for the incredibly thin, but lively face of a 90-year old yoga lady teacher I met briefly yesterday during an open day event organised by my art club. But just now I realised that this is an opportunity to portray, mostly from imagination, a particular neonatologist. For a reason connected with my son’s story the absence of his face from my memory has haunted my days and nights for years. After having been “acquainted” for such a long time and from some written correspondence I have a fairly clear idea of his character. I need him to be looking away from the observer’s scrutinizing eye, while the visible part of his face and posture needs to radiate some of the stress and discomfort associated (in most people) with lying and I remember the occasion, when he had to lie to us on a large scale and the mood in the hospital conference room was incredibly tense. This gave me the idea of using a set of lines of varying width to reproduce the tension connecting the room, a luminescent computer screen showing the truth to be distorted, and his face.

In order to see how these lines might be produced I did some research. On http://matsysdesign.com/category/information/profile/ I found a project initiated by the architect Andrew Kudless, exploring connections between between architecture and biology. For some examples see http://matsysdesign.com/category/projects/scripted-movement-1/  (please scroll down to “Untitled #7”, “Untitled #8” and “Untitled #15). Looking further I came across the weird line drawings made by Aminath Hilmy (http://www.outsiderart.info/hilmy.htm), where human shapes are described by and entangled with the lines, which make up their surroundings, so that they become one. See e.g. http://www.outsiderart.info/images2/hilmy4.jpg. Getting closer to what I want to express is Eeva Honkanen on http://eevahonkanen.com/kiire.html. Still not enough. I needed to find something different. The thought then crossed my mind that this was the point to revisit the very first exercises of this course and the emotion, which has had so much influence on my life: anxiety. I had a look at what I had drawn to express anxiety and decided to continue experimenting to find a way to create an imaginary portrait using nothing but tension lines of anxiety.

Here are my original anxiety marks. The first attempt is not suitable, because it means bursts of anxiety alternating with periods of calm. The one below it appears to me to be too organized due to the constant line width and parallel lines, although I might need such lines to model the face.

So think that I want a combination of the two types of line on the right and  would like to attempt and work with a combination of tools (ink pens of different widths, charcoal and pastel sticks, eraser etc.). Results of the experiments to follow in a separate post.