Clay sculpting on the theme of emotions!

Emotions are at the heart of animation because they bring characters to life and allow audiences to connect with them. By sculpting expressions like joy, sadness, or frustration, students were able to explore how a simple eyebrow movement or the curve of a smile breathes life into a character. The hands-on experience helped them understand how muscles, skin, and facial structures interact to create a realistic emotion, offering a different perspective for their future 3D work, which is often approached from a more technical angle.

For this workshop, students chose characters from animated films and cartoons, including Alfredo Linguini from Ratatouille, Gru from Despicable Me, the video game character Wario, Luca Paguro from Luca, and Mei from Turning Red. The challenge: each character had to have a human-like face (or humanized features if they chose to portray an animal) and exist in a 3D version without any beards or mustaches that might obscure expressions.

The workshop began with creating a neutral face on the first day, and the future 3D animators gradually sculpted different emotions: joy, anger, surprise, sadness… By regularly moistening their sculptures and covering them with a damp cloth, they could easily rework the same piece. Each step of the creation process was photographed to capture every expression.

Jean LEPRÊTRE guided students throughout the week, first teaching them gestures and tool handling, then moving on to project development. Each creation phase was accompanied by anatomical references, along with an analysis of volumes and guidelines to accurately represent emotions.

This clay sculpting workshop not only enhanced the technical skills of MoPA students but also sharpened their ability to observe emotions—an essential quality for 3D modeling in their final-year animation film.

Thank you to Jean LEPRÊTRE for this sculpting workshop and to our talented students for their dedication!

 

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