“How To Control Walter,” Robert Marcantonio, CG Animation

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“Viewing Friday Night Lights (FNL),” Robert Marcantonio writes, “has helped me grow as an animator because the show has taught me the importance of body language when animating a character.”

Robert Marcantonio participated in the Spring 2016 Friday Night Lights summative elective seminar. Meet “Walter,” his FNL-inspired character above. Read excerpts  of his essay below.

Marcantonio explains:

Imagine you want to animate a character that is sad.  What comes to mind?  Slouched shoulders, droopy eyes, and an over all hunched stance? Say you want this character to simply walk across the screen. Perhaps he lost his job.  Maybe his girlfriend dumped him.  To effectively convey his state of mind, you need to put him in motion. As he walks across the screen with his body taking on an over all hunched look, you could make him take very slow, short steps.  Perhaps his feet drag across the ground.  His arms could drop to his sides and barely move.  His head and shoulders could slump towards the ground.

I start with the feet when I animate characters because feet are the most honest part of our bodies.  They advertise how we feel, even without us being aware of it.  “If you want to decode the world around you and interpret behavior accurately, watch the feet and the legs; they are truly remarkable and honest in the information they convey,” writes former FBI agent Joe Navarro in What Every Body is Saying. Friday Night Lights richly illustrates Navarro’s point…. In FNL, everyone jumps up and down when the Panthers win state in season one. They almost seem to defy gravity, which suggests their boundless joy and happiness.

I move on to the torso.  This part of the body can have a wealth of nonverbal tells, because there are many parts to observe: the hips, abdomen, chest and shoulders (Navarro, 85).  In FNL, Tim Riggins uses his torso very subtly, yet it gives the viewer an idea of what his personality is.  He hunches constantly, not in a defensive way, but in a care free, cool, “anything goes” kind of posture. He tends to drink a lot of beer, not worry about the future, hook up with girls, and occasionally get into fights.  Tim’s best friend, Jason Street, is quite the opposite (specifically before he ends up in a wheelchair).  Street stands tall.  His shoulders are always straight.  When he walks, he looks like he knows where he is going.  He was a guy who knew his future and was confident in achieving his dreams.

The reason why Tim Riggins is so interesting to an animator is because he has very little dialogue and relies on non-verbal tells.  In one important scene in Season One Episode Seventeen, Riggins walks into a bar to engage in a fight with an older man.  Prior to the fight, Tim is intoxicated and feels the need to perhaps prove that he is a man, even though he is just a kid.  When he walks into the bar to find his opponent, he leans to one side.  His torso communicates his motive and causes his whole body to just slump in a relaxed pose.  Once he signals to his opponent to walk outside and fight, the man walks out excited, but Riggins shifts gears. He stands robotic as wind up toy, goose-stepping to his destination.

Face matters, too.  A study of the face by Albert Mehrabian in Communications Study found that roughly 45% of a message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in words that are spoken and the way they are said.  A whopping 55% of a message relating to feelings and emotions is in facial expression (Mehrabian).  Facial gestures can emit a vast range of emotions.  As Navarro explains, “When it comes to emotions, our faces are the mind’s canvas” (Navarro, 165).

As a character animator, I like to use CG “rigs” that give me the ability to create complex emotions and movements.  I animated “Walter” above.  A vendor sells “Walter” to animators: endowing  him with motion, I gave him life. I see him as an outdoors-inspired old man.  I gave my Walter four basic emotions: contentment and happiness, astonishment, “pent-up-rage”, and a stern look.  Each gesture involves a lot of jaw, eye, eyebrow, mouth, shoulder, chest, and cheek movements.   The more subtle movements are achieved by moving the ears, areas of the mouth, and areas of eyes (the pupils, for example).  I also over-emphasized his facial gestures by adding squashes and stretches of the entire face.  Even the hat is animating, thus furthering the exaggeration effect I’m going for.

My Walter emerged from seven hours of enjoyable work. He illustrates  what goes on in my head—a plethora of Looney Toons episodes that continually loops indefinitely.   I view him as a work-in-progress. I make him gesticulate here. He illustrates what I learned viewing Friday Night Lights.

Claire Owens, 14″ x 20″ watercolor on Arches paper•Robert Gerst, Digital Editing

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In a summative elective, Professor Robert Gerst notes, students treat culturally rich topics from the perspectives of two or more Liberal Arts disciplines.

In the summative elective Friday Night Lights, students apply what they learned and how they learned to think in previous Liberal Arts courses to a television series that, even as it focuses on high school football in Texas, examines contemporary American society.

In her final Friday Night Lights essay, student Claire Owens writes that, as he coaches, Coach Taylor expresses two profoundly different educational philosophies. In the watercolor above, she expresses her assessment of Coach Taylor as an image.

In the cloud-filled sky above the home field of the Dillon Panthers, Claire Owens represents Coach Taylor’s two approaches. On the left she depicts his tough, stormy coaching. On the right she depicts his sunny, fatherly coaching. Taylor’s balance, she maintains, is what makes the Dillon Panthers the strong team that they are.

Every team needs a hard and stern coach as well as a soft, genuine one, Owens asserts. The middle ground where the two styles combine is the most vital aspect of any sports team, Owens says. For the Dillon Panthers, the blue skies in the distance signify hope for the future and winning the Texas state championship. Ultimately, in this show as in life, the players shine through the stormy clouds, learning and growing from when the coach was hard on them and strengthening their bonds with each other and with the coach when he welcomed them as a father would.

Taylor, Claire Owens judges, exemplifies how an effective coach bonds a team using both stern and gentle coaching methods. She say all that in the hues of her watercolor clouds.