FACS: Facial Action Coding System
Last week Fast Company did a little event to celebrate their 100 Most Creative People in Business issue. As part of it, Ed Ulbrich of Digital Domain spoke of his company’s work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
I knew none of this, but apparently Benjamin’s face is all computer animation, a serious triumph and something many in film thought couldn’t be done. The way Digital Domain accomplished this was by mapping Brad Pitt’s face using something called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS): “The most widely used and versatile method for measuring and describing facial behaviors. Paul Ekman and W.V. Friesen developed the original FACS in the 1970s by determining how the contraction of each facial muscle (singly and in combination with other muscles) changes the appearance of the face.”
In case your curious, here is a list of facial behaviors and some corresponding photos. Also, if you care to sift through a heavy-duty flash site, here is some more info on how they made Benjamin Button.
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So cool. Reminded me of the article Malcolm Gladwell wrote a while back about FACS. (Became a part of his book “Blink,” I think?) He used it to explain why we intuitively know how to react to people — that the way emotions are displayed on our face are innate and universal. Even tribes from the furthest-flung reaches of the earth, who have no contact with “modern” culture, make the same links between a given facial behavior and what emotion that behavior represents.
I can only link to the abstract here, but if you’re a registered user, you can get the whole article too. Well worth the read.