Reference

The topic of the day, as you probably had noticed from the title, is reference. If you were to ask any animator worth their weight in awesomeness, if using reference for an animation was necessary, the vast majority would most assuredly give a resounding yes.

Body language is the same in the regard that in order to truly be able to distinguish between anger, sadness, contempt and all the other visible emotions, we must see them. Anyone can tell us in words what the micro-movements of sadness look like, but it isn’t until we see it in its true form that we can truly analyze it and thus gain experience from it.

Luckily for us we live in the age of easily created and received information. Digital media has grown so much, that one would be hard pressed to not be able to find reference. If in fact there were no reference for what a person needed, digital media is at the point where one could easily create the reference they needed and for a relatively low price.

Now, I am sure that some of the business people that may view this post might think about disregarding this as information meant only for animators. This is simply untrue. In order to truly learn body language for business or any other practical means, you must see real anger, sorrow, happiness and other emotions and mannerisms. After all if you were to build a business website focusing on social networking, there is a very good chance that you will reference other successful and sometimes unsuccessful social network websites in order to better your own website.

What I hope that animators get from this post is simply reinforcement of the need for reference in any work they may do, especially those that focus on facial emotions. For the business people, I hope that they understand the need to research outside resources in order to really understand how body language affects people and therefore how it can affects business.

To drive the "point" home as well as offer a bit of entertainment, I have provided a link below of a college sorority girl that is genuinely sad about something. While this video may make you laugh, I would like you to try your best to analyze the signs of sadness that the girl shows us. P.s. you may want to skip to 15 seconds in, that way you may actually see her face.

Crying Sorority Girl

References:
Picture: http://www.carrollk12.org/Assets/image/lhs/other/electronic_reference.jpg
Link: Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sd-j0rKeKw