lip synching

We've moved on to the lip synching exercise. I have to say I'm quite looking forward to it!
So, first we were given a sound bite to animate to but first of all we needed a character.  Onto Designing!

 

I have no intention of animating this much detail at the moment, it would take too long and be too difficult to keep consistency, Therefore I had to simplify it, which also meant adding expressions and mouth shapes which we would relate to sounding vowels and continuances.

I’m planning to use the first half of the sound bite bite, but it had to make sense, as there are two separate voices and I have only one character, so, I gave her a hand puppet.

I think this design will be my testing character, so she has no personality except the ones I need for learning and testing techniques for animation.

I’m finding the squash and stretch idea difficult to apply to her, but that’s also to so with where to place the mouth for which emotion while remaining in line with the jaw. I have found myself referring to "the animation survival kit" by Richard William because it has a really helpful; section on mouth movements and shapes in relations to words and how they sound. So far I have only just started making the frames for line test. Lots of work to do!

walk cycle 3

So today I had another attempt at the walk cycle before moving on to lip-syncing. The arm movement here is ridiculously erratic and makes no sense, but I am much happier with the leg movement and how much more smoothly it flows.

Unfortunately the poor arm movement takes away completely from the rest of the movement and my frustration with the walk cycle is much more obvious here. Also I think I've paid to little attention to the arms and underestimated their importance of making the walk look believable.

Overall I think this one is the better out of the others, mainly because I new what I was doing and had found a book which was helpful. I referenced most in-between frames from the book “the Animators reference book” this book consists of small photos of people in different movement positions, which I found it immensely helpful.

I would like to revisit this particular walking man, and make it neater, apply a design to it and ad more character to the walk but for now I think it’s time to move on, otherwise I will eave myself no time for lip syncing.