Intent
My intent for next year final major project is to understand
how movement, gestures and facial expressions convey emotions. I will then use
the gestural drawings to illustrate my own graphic novel narrative.
My objectives are to understand the human body in
relationship to depicting emotion, so I want to study everything that causes
movement and expressions such as seeing muscle movement and how muscle movement
creates emotional gestural response. To achieve these things I have been
looking at different forms of media to see how body movement has worked to show
emotional response. I have also looked at comics to see how they depict emotion
through movement in the image. Below are my findings of gestural movement by
various artists’ work and medium which relates to what I want to achieve.
My idea is to produce
a comic that shows how body movement makes a story with very little narrative. To achieve this goal I need explore a genre
that expresses a lot of emotional reactions without using narrative. I want to
go for a horror theme because with those kinds of films like Psycho and Alien
it is mostly carried through with the characters body language. If the
characters feel fear and show it through their body language, you also feel
that fear with them. The best way to describe this effect is by using the scene
from “Alien”, this scene is the chest bursting scene. The reason why I chose
this scene was because the actors were not told about the Alien about to come
out of chest, this scene showed natural fear and this was shown by the reaction
of the characters/actors. This is the kind of natural movement that I want to
focus on in my comic, ones that sends an emotion across without using
words.
The artists that I will be focusing on are a mixture but
relate to the idea of creating emotion through body movement.
Stjepan Sejic
Stjepan
Sejic is a Comic book artist that produces and writes his own comics series. He
has published his own comics with the help of the company he works for Top Cow.
They helped him produce his own comic series namely Sunstone and Death Vigil. Stjepan Sejic started his career by posting
his artwork online and was noticed by Arcane comics for his first gig. He then
got a job with Top Cow to colour covers with Tyler Kirkham and as time went on
he got to show his drawings to the editor of Top Cow Renae Geerlings and then
he was given the offer of creating his own comics series. His influences are Marc Silvestri, Michael Turner and Alex
Ross.
With Stjepan
Sejic’s work he does it in a style that captures the movement in each panel and
when you remove the text you still get the sense of what is happening in the
story by the characters body language/ movement and the facial expression. With
my experimental drawings, I have tried to recreate this idea in my own comic
panel. I think with this task I found it interesting how each movement still
gives the sense of procession and still tells the story. I think when it comes
to the final project and over the summer I will have to experiment more with
this format and help it develop my ideas.
Stjepan Sejic Sunstone
My own experiment based on Stjepan Sejic work
Eadweard Muybridge Photographer
Eadweard Muybridge is
a photographer who created a series of animals and humans captured in motion.
With these photos he created a whole range of angles and motional photos that
show the natural movement of nature. Eadweard Muybridge is also the man that
influenced motion pictures by using a zoopraxiscope,
which gave the sense of movement by using a series of his images and moving
them fast to give the illusion of movement. Eadweard Muybridge was influenced
by the idea locomotion. Eadweard
Muybridge got into the photography business when he went back to America in the
mid 1860s, with this return to America he specialized in landscape and
architectural photography.
With Eadweard Muybridge I looked at a range of series of movement
studies to understand how natural movement occurs. With this I developed the
idea to just do simple basic outline so that I could get the basic idea of what
was happening in the series of movement. I decided on this because when it
comes me developing my ideas in the major projects I can use this method. So
that I can get the basic outline of a person movement and also to influence my
future possible poses for my characters.
|Example of Eadweard Muybridge photography work
My gestural line experiment
Peter Jansen Sculptures
Peter
Jansen is a sculptor that studied Physics and Philosophy and after
a few years of accompanying canoe and survival groups he decided to spend his
life in art. The movement captured in these sculptures are
to describe a series of movement and capturing it into one single frame of
time. To capture this movement he used 3D animation on a computer to for his influence.
To create his pieces of work he creates casts of them and then recreate them
either in bronze or Polyamide.
With
these sculptures I found it great for understand movement because it shows how
it works by stopping a series of movement into one moment. With this I have
tried to recreate these sculptures by simple filing them into basic shading to
get the basic shape of them to understand the basic form and to get the sense
of movement. With these sculptures I may look at 3D animation software’s that
could possible create ones like this so that I can create my own motive to
understand the human form.
Example of Peter Jansen work
My experiment using Peter Jansen work
Marc Davis – Disney
Animator
Marc Davis is an animator that worked for Disney. He help
create the some of the most iconic Disney films and characters such as
Cinderella or Maleficent. Marc Davis was a renaissance man because he did a
multiple field of artwork. He was an art collector, painter, character designer,
and story board, architecture for the Disney world rides,
animator and fine artist. He taught his self by sketching at everyday locations.
He was noticed by Disney because of his range of artistic skills and his
artistic talent. He was influenced by the artist Frederick Remington’s
sculptures because they captured the idea of movement. He was also fascinated
by the idea of movement.
With Marc Davis he learned movement from studying live
subjects, he studied the movement of each subject. He captured the mood of the
model by the movement such as tiger drawings which show that it ready to
protect it territory by the way it’s back is going up and it mouth open
slightly. It give the sense that it about attack. With this idea of movement I
want to apply it to my own work. So to help me get ideas I need to study animals
and humans from observation to get an idea of how emotion are shown through a
poses.
Marc Davis movement board
Tiger Drawing by Marc Davis
Book: Marc Davis Walt Disney’s Renaissance man published by Disney editions
With these artists they all relate to idea of what it takes
to capture movement but in their various formats. For example Eadweard
Muybridge captures the human movement through photography with Marc Davis
visual records movement through drawings. Overall these artists visual record
movement and show what it can give so for example with Eadweard Muybridge photo
series of the women jumping over an object gave the idea that she was running
away from something.
Body movement influence here are some of my finds:-
First- Sia Chandelier
created on 6th May 2014
I chose this music video because it expresses emotions
through movement.
With this
music video it uses a dancer by the name Maddie Ziegler who
performs free expression dancing which was choreographed by Ryan Heffington.
This music video is about dealing with pain by drinking it away. The movement
of this Dancer is expressing the emotions that are building up inside Sia as
she drinks away. The randomness of the moves represents her mood swings and
emotional state. As the music video progresses it starts with drinking and then
getting drunk, this is shown through the movement and facial expression showing
different emotions and as the music video comes to the end it is about
accepting that pain.
With my drawings examples I have taken some of the dance
movements to gain an understanding of the emotions put across with the body movement.
The emotions that came across were erratic, you never got a sense of what was
going to happen and it was unpredictable. This gave the sense of drinking when
you are not in control. The emotions that I was drawing gave the sense that
they were an emotional wreck and were also washed in sadness. But when the music video came to an end I got
a sense of accepting, this was shown through the dance slowing down and
movement being more elegant than chaotic.
My drawings of Sia music video
Second- Metropolis
Film (1927) A German expressionist film
This film which was created in 1927 was a silent film based
on a future society that is broken into different categories rich from the
poor. There is this main female lead called Maria who is played by Brigitte
Helm who plays two roles in the movie. One of the roles is Maria as an innocent
women that is trying to get the two classes of people to journey together, but
in her other role she plays a role of a robot that has the same appearance but
a complete different personality.
With this film I studied the character Maria’s movement and
facial expression to understand how she creates the two entirely different
characters. With the innocent Maria she moves smoothly and softly giving the
feeling of good/innocence. This is shown by the small steps she makes and the
gracefulness of her movement. While the other character is hunchbacked with one
closed eye, she is also more expressive and more outspoken in her body language
which is mostly shown through bold gestures.
My drawings of the character Maria
These two films relate to each other because they show how
movement effects a scene and how it expresses the emotions of the character,
which is a major function that I want to aim for. With the visual recording that I made with
these two film taught me how emotion effect a scene and how it creates a
emotion by just a simple movement so with this idea I want to continue this
idea of expressive movement.
Objectives over the summer
- To look other range of expressive gestures such as martial arts, acting, culture paintings, sculptures and puppetry
- Do a range of short stories and create them in a graphic novel layout
- To find and research horror writers writing style
- To visual record movement and background from people from a everyday experience
My intention over
this summer is take a sketchbook with me where ever I go to make a visual
recording of the scenes. I did this during my trip to Antwerp in which I visually
recorded my journey. With these drawings what I will do is use different media
such as ink and watercolours as well as my fine liners wash. With the drawings
there selves I just need to practice to get better and also include a
background to my models to make it visually interesting.
Overall I have an idea what I want to do and I have a list
of what I should do over the summer to help me develop my idea.
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