What we create is a condition that releases a smile. We don't consider ourselves 'faking' a smile. We chose for the moment to allow us to smile.

Smiling is a release, not a construct. (in case that helps animators any)

And thanks for the link and everyone's posts. Made me smile. (still smiling actually)

Oh and 15/20 for me too!

cheers

Very informative though. I guess it's not so much about what is real, but what people think is real.

15/20.

A good reference source for animation. It seems most of the people who smiled for real finished their smiles slowly, had more incidental movement of the body and head and had more pronounced movement of the eyes. I guess it means that if you want your characters to smile then don't be lazy. ;)

Good info to have.

No, good actors smile genuinely. They really feel glad or have to laugh. Really good acting comes from within and the body more or less does the rest. It's not that hard to really feel things by concentrating the right way.

I knew to look at the eyes too, but I was so surprised I did so well on the test. Recently I read a link off a Slashdot story how different cultures use different emoticons. Here in the West (well…Texas, that's fairly West, I think?) we use emoticons like :-) and :-( and so on because we tend to look at the mouth to gague emotion. From this article, I understand that in Asia emoticons are entirely different, (^_^)is a happy face and (;_;) is a sad face.

I've had Chinese friends that abbreviate the happy face to ^^ but on the whole I had to figure out by context what was meant by these truncated emoticons.

here's the source: http://www.livescience.com/health/070510_facial_culture.html