Jack Nicholson-The Perfect model for facial muscle study + Toon Boom techniques I discovered.

 Every artist has their own favorite actor.

Some would say it's Kirk Douglas. Some would say it's Channing Tatum.

For me, I have many, all actors who were in a movie no later than 1999.

But if you ask me what's the perfect man to look up to for facial muscle study, I'm going to say Jack Nicholson.

Seriously, this guy really can ACT. He's been a staple of many a films since he started acting in 1955.

But his career didn't really skyrocket until the late 60's with Easy Rider.

For me, I mostly know him for his performance as Randall P McMurphy in 

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, 

Jack Torrance in THE SHINING,

The Joker from BATMAN (Though I still prefer Heath Ledger as Joker)

Colonel Jessup in A FEW GOOD MEN,

Just to name a few.

But really, it's the whole Jack Torrance thing I'm most impressed with because I actually look at this one scene from THE SHINING where he's a in a bar. The way he moves his facial muscles during his dialogue and laugh sequences are perfect examples of facial muscle studies. There are other scenes that qualify such as the Here's Johnny and Big Bad Wolf scenes but the Bar Scene is a personal favorite of mine.

One reason I'm getting on this topic of facial muscles is because I need to retrain my brain on understanding muscle studies. The muscle studies I was taught in college were mostly for full body which is fine I guess but really, half should have been dedicated towards the face.

Most of the facial muscle studies go towards two things in animation: 2D Hand drawn and 3D CG facial controls.

The same can't be said about puppet rigs due to the complexity of bones or the constrained nature of the either construction or pre-drawn mouth shapes.

I actually experimented with doing this on puppet rigs using this one rig based on a Japanese video game character. Even though he was easier to manage than most 2D Puppet rigs alongside locking the jaw animation to his many mouth presets, it was still as constrained as I felt.

It's clear Jack Nicholson and Puppet Rigs don't mix.

Oh well, I may have better luck with 3D Animation for this particular voice clip when I take it to Autodesk Maya and do my lip sync and pantomime. 

After all, animation both 2D and 3D is all based on keyframes.

Aside from Adventure Time or Rick and Morty, most puppet rigs generally avoid trying to emulate live-action cinematography in favor of tried-and-true convention for animation. I get that when the tools are readily available, you stick with them but in my opinion, experimentation really matters. I dislike conventional techniques since it's repeating the same tired old trick in the book. What happened to the days of experimenting with new things?

To give you an idea what I'm experimenting with in 2D Animation, I'm beginning to add drop shadows to all my hand drawn cels using the composite and shadow nodes in Toon Boom's Node editor.

Funny thing is, I used to dread nodes due to their complexity but now I've embraced them for their merits such as connecting things from one node to another. Things like pegs, shadows, brightness, cameras, etc.

Forgive the incomplete nature of this post. I was using a different computer to create this post. All my other photos are in my Custom Built PC's hard drive. Once I get my files, I'll update this post.

But no need to worry. If the drop shadow node is interesting, I'll make a post on How I do drop shadows on Toon Boom using the Node Editor.