About 4 weeks ago, I may of mentioned that our next exercise would be part of the monthly competitions held over at the 11 Second Club. We were given a choice of animating to either this current month’s sound clip, or last month’s. I didn’t really care for entering the competition itself (it is optional), so I went with last month’s sound clip. I appear to be the only one.

Break Down

We had to approach the project with weekly goals, uploading our progress each week. Let me break it down for you:

Week 1

By the end of the first week, we had to make sure we had our video reference footage recorded and our dope sheets prepared. I found it quite difficult to imagine poses for the clip, so I wrote the clip out, then broke it down into key words/phrases and brainstormed a few possibilities for each. Then it was just a case of seeing which flowed into each the best. See the clip below.

The dope sheets always give me neck strain? It took me about 20 tedious minutes to work through the 11 second audio, and I think impatience at this stage is what threw out my lip syncing in the final week. Remember boys and girls, this should be done properly, it saves you a lot of time later on. I was just in a rush.

We also had to put together a quick character sheet.

Week 2

In the second week we moved straight into blocking out our animations, using key poses. Definitely the laziest effort this week, since all the lecturers were at this year’s Bradford Animation Festival. I took at good look at the video reference footage I had recorded, and used it to animate the character into his most important poses. Quicktime is great to use for reference, as it allowed you to scroll through frames individually. At this stage the there is only natural tweening between poses. See video below.

We were encouraged to use the G_male Rig.

Week 3

During the third week, all of the body movement was completed. All facial features are left untouched. I made sure to start with tidying up the largest movements, since I didn’t want to return to them afterwards, once all the fingers and smallest movements are keyframed. It really puts you off going back in, if there are keys on almost every frame. I also started to work on the eye movements and eyebrows, which would be continued in the final week.

Final Week

I was a bit worried about this final week, because I’ve not really done lip syncing before. Also, my dope sheet was a bit out of sync. It also didn’t help that I was using the video ref at the same time, so they conflicted a bit. I decided to just work with my dope sheet, then iron out afterwards. I found the timing seemed better after offsetting the sound clip by -2 frames. After a while I got a bit anal with getting the lip syncing right, to the point were I couldn’t look at it anymore. Get someone else to check it for you, it just won’t look right if you stare at it for too long. Final version is below.

Final Thoughts

I have no idea what to make of my lip-syncing, even now. I was concerned that I had made the animation a bit busy in the end (I was initially worried about under-animating), I think the conclusion was that I had a little over-animated.

A good friend of Andy’s, who had previously worked for Disney, came to be the main judge during our feedback assessment. He didn’t mess around, which was great. He gave everyone critical feedback. His thoughts with mine were more so to do with my choice of actions for the character, rather than the animation itself. His final point was that he felt the character turned too far away from camera towards the end. Basically all things I didn’t even notice or expect.

Well, now I’m off to sail a pirate ship.

R