Introduction

The challenge of communicating emotional content to an audience via animated characters has existed since the art form first appeared. As animation techniques and technology have advanced, animators and character designers find themselves with a multitude of resources and tools for the creation of facial expressions so as to effectively communicate the emotions of their animated characters within each scene. However, by using evolved forms of symbolic facial expression, which are widely accepted, these technologies and techniques often overlook the unconscious communication conveyed via actual human facial expressions. The fundamentals of this instant and unconscious emotional communication have been well studied and documented, yet the systems developed by the scientific community for reading and interpreting facial communication have only occasionally and recently been applied by animators.

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