MAXI DIAZ Animation blog
We humans are social beings by nature and therefore feel the need to communicate with others. We express ourselves through words, facial expressions and body movement. Within this context there are aspects we control more easily, for instance, what we express through words. However there is another much more unintentional and uncontrollable aspect which is non-verbal communication, that is to say, what we express through our body.
The sequence we are about to see is from the House TV series. Doctor Robert and his assistant Chi are performing an endoscopy on a patient. Natalie, the patient’s wife, is present in the room and she’s talking with the two doctors about his husband, who’s practically unconscious. Suddenly, a man named Joseph comes into the room. He’s the young man who helps Natalie take care of her husband Andrés on a regular basis.
The moment Joseph enters the room, Natalie makes a coquettish flick with her hands moving her hair to the sides of her face to expose it. This flick is coming from within her, in a totally uncontrollable way for Natalie, and it instantly shows her feelings for joseph.
Hands play one of the most important parts in non-verbal communication because they are the mirror of the emotions we’re feeling within and they tip-off our interlocutor as to what is really going on inside our minds.
As animators we must deal with saying a lot more with our characters hands and learn to use them as one of the most important acting resources we’ll have in the scene. Many times we complain about not having enough duration in a shot to say all that we’d like to and we fail to realize that with such a subtle movement in such a small span of time we are able to convey a lot more information than in a whole sequence.
