Documentaries...

I have just finished watching two documentaries that I found on the internet which I felt related to my project and would help improve my knowledge on facial expressions and body language.

The first documentary I watched was the four-part BBC series entitled 'The Human Face' which was presented by John Cleese and featured a star-studded class including the co-presenter for the series Liz Hurley. I decided to watch the majority of the series but I focused the majority of my attention on the hour special entitled 'Face to Face' which looked at the purpose of the face and how it reveals our personality. Throughout the episode Cleese looked at the seven universal emotions and used case studies, such as a couple close to divorce to show how these emotions which are displayed on our face can affect the relationships we share together. Cleese also talks to Professor Paul Ekman who talks about how to discover a liar and what details to look out for in the face that might be a giveaway. I found this episode extremely insightful especially finding out about how our subconscious emotions can affect the people around us much more than we think. I also learnt a lot more about the micro expression especially in terms of how this can be a sign of concealment or that someone is lying.

The second documentary I watched was a 90 minute special documentary originally showed on the History Channel in the US, entitled 'Body Language Secrets'. The first half of this documentary focused on human body language and how it helps when interacting with each other, for example having a open body language is more likely to help you sell something. The second half of the documentary was a lot more interesting in terms of relating to my project as it focused on the body language of the face. Initially the documentary introduced the work of Paul Ekman and talked about his experiments to discover the seven universal emotions. I found this extremely interesting as it showed video clips of Ekman's experiment. One in particular showed Ekman asking people to put them self in a scenario to make them feel hat particular emotion and then he did the same thing to lots of other people around the world and compared his findings. This is how he came up with the idea that everyone has seven universal emotions which are recognised all around the world.

I have yet to watch the ITV doc 'Tears, Lies and Videotape' but I intend to watch and analyse the episode in the near future.