Chris Landreth broke out with his Oscar-winning animated short, Ryan. Now he conducts research on facial expressions and body language and helps a brand-new generation of animators make the connection between technical prowess, insight, and artistry. In this interview, he answers question about his current projects, his research, and his next big endeavor: a feature-length animated documentary. Chris also reveals the inauspicious start to his film career (which started with getting fired via fax) and his secret for finding inspiration in the mundane.
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Instructor’s Welcome Note:
– My name is Chris Landreth I am an animator and film maker I’m based out of Toronto, Canada. For the past 25 years, or so, I’ve been exploring the strange world of CG Animation. In that time I’ve done many animated short films that have gotten me some notoriety. In addition to that I do teaching of animation and I do research at the University of Toronto In, hopefully what we think are breakthrough things in animation, particularly character animation.
The things that keep me busy now are film making and research and teaching. I teach a course, a master class called Making Faces. This is a course on character animation but concentrating on a characters face. That opened up a big world of teaching and learning because there really isn’t that much formal teaching on that subject, but it’s a huge subject. I’ve developed a course which I take to universities and to studios, to schools around the world.
I’ve taught this at Dreamworks, at Digital Domain, the University of Pennsylvania many other places over the last five years. It focuses on what we do with our faces and it goes out from that into, well, construction and finally animation of a face. Animation, in this case really aligns with acting. What the course starts off being about is how a face works, I go into the anatomy of a face I go into that how that could be translated into the way that you would rig a face.
The real thrust of the course is observing. Observation about what we as human beings do with our faces to show you know, happiness, sadness, anger, fear and then those very nuanced emotions like coflict and jealousy and the kind of subtext that you show when you are showing one emotion but you’re actually feeling another emotion.
– [Off Screen Interviewer (OSI)] Yeah, yeah. – That shows up on a face and if you can see those things on a human face you’re going to know a lot of what it takes to make your character really kick ass. – [OSI] Right. The face of a character really to show intelligence and emotion and those things that really make a character come alive. – I think we already have come out of the Uncanny Valley. You look at a lot of the work that, for example I don’t know if you’re familiar with the ICT at the University of Southern California with Paul Debevec’s project? What you’re seeing there is coming out of the Uncanny Valley The work that that group has done with, you know you see some of this actually at SIGGRAPH this year, the work with creating ultra realistic models, textures, shaders, of human skin and combining that with arguable perfectly done motion capture, has brought us out of the Uncanny Valley.
But for animators who are trying to create characters and do the work that brings realism to their characters, we have a long way to go. That requires not just the technical prowess that we’ve seen developed over the last 10 yeras but that requires insight and that requires getting what a face does. Reading it requires being a detective and being really insightful, that’s what I try to teach. Yes, someday we’ll come out of that Uncanny Valley, to me that’s not the point.
The point is not realism, the point is believability and empathy and whether a character looks uncannily real or whether that character looks like a cartoon character you’ve still got to know that insight, that’s what I’m trying to teach. I got into CGI as a second life. My first life was being a mechanical engineer that’s what I got my Masters degree in and for two or three years, three years after doing that I was doing research at the University of Illinois in fluid mechanics.
During that time I realized that I’d really like to be applying the more left brained side of me to my life and it was at that point that University of Illiniois, that’s where I was, became this kind of weird mecca of computer, early computer graphics research and education. A person, a teacher named, a professor named Donna Cox started a program there called the Renaissance Experimental Laborato
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