In blendshape-based facial animation, two main approaches are used to create the key expressions: manual sculpting and statistically-based techniques. Hand-generated expressions have the advantage of being intuitively recognizable, thus allowing animators to use conventional keyframe control. However, they may cover only a fraction of the expression space, resulting in large reproduction animation errors. On the other hand, statistically-based techniques produce eigenfaces that give minimal reproduction errors but are visually non-intuitive. In the invention the applicants propose a technique to convert a given set of hand-generated key expressions into another set of so-called quasi-eigen faces. The resulting expressions resemble the original hand-generated expressions, but have expression space coverages more like those of statistically generated expression bases. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated by applying it to hand-generated expressions.