Facing challenges (final part)

Previously, I said that I'd like to animate small and complex movements, and I hope to use that to make the animation richer and more life-like.
But what makes your work life-like?
That's a question that many artist ask themselves at some point, and there's a simple way to understand the answer.
You look at life.
Artists have done this since the beginning of art, because to be honest, if you don't know how something looks it's quite hard to draw it convincingly.

This is something that helped animators as well. One example for traditional animation is Disney studios, where the artists would go to the zoo to study animals, and hire models for reference shoots at the studios themselves.
I will add that this raises a simple question. Because if you have actors performing the whole scene, why not just trace the reference?
This is true, and has a name: rotoscoping. Historically, this has always looked awful. Every. Single. Time. The artist's hand in the animation is almost completely lost, and the result looks incredibly bland.
I will not look to rotoscoping.

But there's one thing I will look at: motion capturing. You might be familiar with this from Avatar and Peter Jackson's the Lord of the Rings. Here's an example from a videogame called L.A. Noire:

L.A. Noire: The technology behind the Performance by Team Bondi, uploaded by IGN

I really like at how they let a computer look at the actor by making it look at the volumes in the actor's face. I think this is important because these volumes, usually muscles and/or fat, not only define how something looks, but also have an impact on what's around them.
An example: the face.
Eyes are very important in any acting performance. The eyes can move themselves easily enough, but they are also subtly pushed and their shape slightly distorted by the volumes around them. These are the eyebrows and cheeks. Here's a test I made a little while ago, where I marked the eyebrow and cheek volumes.

Now what really fascinates me is the idea that these volumes can be taken separately, and streetched and squashed and moved to fit onto a different face. Maybe something non-human like the face of a snake. And then their movement can be used to make that snake act as the human would, with all the subtle movement intact and the way it would be expected to move...if snakes could talk.
I have not tried this yet, but it will be my other challenge:

Use capturing to include characters' (human and non-human) subtler motions into the animation.


And that was the last of the long technical posts about the function, or reason why I want to make this animation.
The next post will be about the contents, so I get to tell you a story.
And to round up I'll post about the visual design where I get to show you some of the works that inspire me visually. Great stuff :)