More on Eye Movements in animation

Kevin continues his series focused on the eyes over at SynchroLux. He begins:

This will be a shorter post than that on Vanilla Blinks, not because there’s less to say, but because there’s too much. As we saw, there’s a lot of quantifiable information about the generic, spontaneous blinks that we do all the time. Imagine how much could be written about variations on standard blinks!

But instead of trying to write a book, I’m going to point a few things out, post some samples, and leave it to the reader to study the varieties of blink types is the rich reference material we’re surrounded by every day (like, real life, movies, TV, etc.).

There are three basic blink categories: spontaneous, voluntary, and reflex. Hopefully those categories are self-explanatory. Eye Movements 4 was about spontaneous blinks, but regardless of their type, all blinks exhibit a similar pattern. For example, the upper lid accounts for virtually all of the closure, and the closing phase is always much faster than the opening phase. The overall duration of a blink is also very similar among all three types, though spontaneous blinks tend to last slightly longer.

It’s really in the pattern of blinks and blink variants that we see real variety. . .

You can read the full post here, and also view a quicktime of a sequence from Truffaut's The 400 Blows that illustrates some of the ideas.