Sometimes our emotional state is immediately apparent, revealed to others by the expressions on our face.  Other times our emotions are invisible to the people around us despite the intense reactions we feel from within. The first animation I created for my senior project explored how emotions are communicated through expressionistic faces, but for my work this semester, I became intrigued with physical reactions to intense emotions. When I emotionally experience feelings of deep sadness or love in particular, I am hit by tight, painful sensations in my chest, like something is physically squeezing my heart. My ultimate goal is to find ways to make the invisible visible, to give form to something that is only felt. My work this semester explores this idea.

To do this, I realized I had to take emotion out of the recognizable context of the face and instead use symbolic objects, their distinct movements, and their interactions with other objects to express emotions in my charcoal animation. I represent love through a ribbon—it flutters down the page, as if weightless, in soft, gentle motions. It is drawn in a light, faint way to emphasize its airiness. It settles around an anatomical heart in a caressing manner before dancing away again. The paper I drew on also allowed the charcoal to be erased fully on the white background of the ribbon, which made its movements feel lighter. Conversely, sadness is represented by a thick, heavy liquid that oozes down the page, and cages the heart in a painful squeeze. I used a dark background in my representation of sadness in order to make the erasures between frames more apparent, so that the liquid representing sadness left a harsh trail. I use an anatomical heart because of its existing association with emotion. It beats consistently until its interactions with the emotions, causing it to stutter in its rhythm and change speed.