What is non-verbal communication?

• Facial expressions,
• body movements,
• gestures,
• all this “body language”.

It is most commonly said that 60 to 80% of human communication is expressed through non-verbal communication.

Non verbal communication is an essential point to understand and master in animation. It can tell the mood of the character and helps understand the emotions, what the character is thinking.

The important communication is displayed through the character’s body language.

Body appearance matter! Body communicates even without movement, for example the message will be understood differently if the character is tall and big than if the it was small and cute.

Eye communication is also very important!

“Eyes are the windows to the soul.”

And this is true! Only by looking at the eyes of a character you should be able to guess what he is thinking, what is his mood, emotion etc.

 

Most animations show emotions and feelings non-verbally. With each character lies an entire new set of non-verbal cues. In order to make characters more ‘human’, we give them strong non-verbal communication clues helping depicting qualities that we, as humans, could empathize with and understand.

I think it is important for animation students to realise the importance of non-verbal communication and be able to play with it to make an animation more appealing. This is something we can all achieve but we just need to look more closely to what we see in real life and think about it.