In my learning of facial acting, I came across Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen. FACS itself is a system or a tool to measure or recognise facial expressions or movement based on the muscular activity. The breakdowns of these facial changes are called Action Units. I haven’t found access on the complete guidelines book of this system but based on the book “Emotion in The Human Face” edited by Paul Ekman, There are 33 Action Units listed and 11 more descripted as “simply defined Action Units”.
How to read these Action Units:
The scoring of AUs is based on the facial movement of the subject, not necessarily by emotion. In the book itself, the description of each AUs tried to minimize using more subjective terms, such as sad eyes or happy eyes. But using more technical term such as brow lowerer or upper lid raiser, so to learn about the AUs, we need to be familiar with the wording. Another thing is to understand facial muscles and how it works, because some AUs will trigger another AUs to happen at the same time because of the muscular factor. I am intended to find out more about FACS and to gain access to the complete guidelines in order to better my limited understanding about this.
To DO!
While learning about FACS, I have an idea to create an experimental and interactive way of learning these AU’s. My idea is to create set of controllers in 3D Software based on the AUs to help me learn how to differentiate each one. I haven’t got the chance to create this yet! But I will update my experiment when I finally do it. Maybe somewhere in the internet world, there is an access to this 3D approach of learning FACS, but still, I think it would be good for me to start from scratch so I could understand better.
Personally, I think that learning FACs would be beneficial for an animator, because it could specify the more subjective terms of human emotions and facial changes and then use it as a part of communication tool.