One of the main things I wanted to try during this project was to model and animate a human head, as I have not really tried it before. Earlier in my blog there are a couple of images of the opening stages of the head modelling tutorial I followed, where the head it still quite blocky and awful looking.

I carried on with the tutorial, and kept dividing the faces using the split polygon tool to make the head more detailed and create the shape that I wanted. I then smoothed the head to make the shape seem softer and more rounded.

I also added eyes so that I could make Jareth blink.


In order to make Jareth's mouth move, I created blend shapes of the head with the mouth in different positions. I created A, I, O and a normal no movement shape as these gave a variety of shape that I could key between and also I aminly needed the A and I shapes as the mouth was wide open for laughing. You can also see the controllers for his eyes in this image, for the eyes themselves, his eye lids and the pupils. I do wish that I had taken a little more time to make completely convincing facial movements such as moving around the eyebrows and the cheeks for example, yet this would have been more time consuming and I needed to concentrate on my animation.

Here is the final model. I used a photograph of David Bowie as a texture for my head model, as this easily gave me his likeness and features. I realised by adding this that the shape of the head werent quite right for him as the eyes were too wide, but in a way I quite liked this as it seems more surreal and matches the strangeness of the scene.

So here are the final Jareth animations, using David Bowie's laugh that I cut from earlier on in the film. I will add this to the end of my piece as Sarah falls, as if he has got her. I did try to add hair to the head yet struggled for hours with it not looking right, or not being the colour I wanted. In the end, I will probably use photoshop to add the hair as a seperate image so that he does not look bald in the scenes.

Original without texture:

Textured: