The Designed Representations Of Body Language On Clay Puppets

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 116):

In stop-motion animations such as Coraline story characters are portrayed by puppets. Their movements, body language and facial expressions are designed by animators to match the pre-recorded speech of voice actors. The animations are developed frame-by-frame as animators make very small changes to the puppet’s face or body. Each change is captured as a ‘stop-motion’ or static frame before being collated and camera recorded to create movements in film (Laika Studios, 2017). In films, the characterisation of the main characters conveys the thematic message; accordingly, every facial or body movement of the main puppet characters (including the way they walk) is designed to express meaning – and so everything they do can be interpreted as semiotic rather than somatic behaviour (see Chapter 1; Mohamed and Nor, 2015; van Leeuwen, 2005). That said, the body movements of secondary characters arguably include both semiotic and somatic behaviour in order to progress the storyline. In this chapter we concentrate on the meaningful behaviour of the main characters.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, epilinguistic representations on clay puppets designed by animators are not instances of the body language of a member of socio-semiotic species.

[2] To be clear, the facial postures and movements of all the puppets designed by the animators represent both social and semiotic systems, in terms of Halliday's linear taxonomy of evolutionary complexity.