Intro:
I originally planned to create a 2D animation and looked at ALT animations ‘Give My Head Piece’ short for inspiration. However, in the end I decided to further work on my 3D skills, but still wanted to use a clip from something local like they did. I wanted to focus on lip syncing as I had never tried 3D lip syncing before. Choosing a clip from Derry Girls was a little bit of a challenge as there aren’t any Northern Irish mouth shape reference images, so I had to use a combination of other reference images, my own accent, and clips from Derry Girls.
Planning:
I started by drawing some quick thumbnails in procreate to plan the standing positions and key poses of the characters. As the audio had 3 characters, I knew I wanted to keep their movements somewhat simple so I would have time to practice lip syncing and interacting with objects.
Untitled_Artwork.gif (1920×1080) (discordapp.com)
I used a Ray rig (James) and changed the hair and eye colour of the waitress rig and modelled my own simple suitcase and drink bottles. I created a simple rig for the suitcase so it could be opened and closed by the blonde character (Erin) and carried by the brunette character (Michelle).
Blockouts, Lip Syncing and Facial Expressions
I wanted the movements of my characters to be as realistic as possible. I recorded myself doing the actions as even though they were simple I still had a specific idea of how they would interact with each other. These recordings also helped with lip syncing later on. I had already a bit of practice doing walk and run cycles, so I wanted to focus more on the upper bodies. Intertwining their arms and hands, lifting heavy objects, and moving strands of hair.
Once I started lip syncing, I found it easier than I thought I would. It was very time consuming, however, I found it interesting to lip sync a derry accent as most vowels go against what you are taught as an animator. I did the lip syncing after I blocked out my key poses as, personally, this helped me get my timing right when exaggerating my poses. I did make a mistake by using translate instead of rotate for the jaw in the lip sync, so I copied and pasted the translate keyframes to rotate in the graph editor so I didn’t have to redo all of my jaw movements.
Before jaw fixed:
Interacting with Objects:
This was my first time animating with a large and heavy object. I added a parent constraint to one of the wrists of Michelle and the suitcase so I could move her without needing to animate the suitcase. I used a youtube reference for lifting and carrying a heavy object which helped break down the feet and hip movements. The man in the video was very heavy footed when finding his balance, so I kept the feet of Michelle off the ground for only a few keyframes and raised and lowered her upper body just as quickly to show the weight of the suitcase. I feel this made her movements more realistic, but also added a little more humour to the scene.
I added a parent constraint to the right wrist of Erin and one of the bottles in the suitcase so she could pick up the object. When I first added the constraint the wrist and hand moved fine, however, from the next day onwards the hand mesh didn’t move when I moved the wrist control. I received feedback, after which I put the bottle in a group so I could easily move it, however, as I used Maya 2023, the waitress rig had some problems, so I was unable to fix the hand.
In betweens:
To make the facial expressions more believable after the initial blockouts, I had to do a lot of work with the eyes. I found creating a realistic eye movement very difficult when using the waitress rig as her eye shape is much more unrealistic than Rays, being very upturned and large. This was one of the hardest things about animating a face as every time I moved the focus of the eyes, I would have to move the eyelids too. Closing them a little more when looking down and opening when then looking up.
I looked closely at the expressions on the actors faces from Derry Girls to get the basic mood of the scene. This made it easier to know when to add the subtle changes to their faces such as when to tense their eyebrows and blinks in between actions.
As the arms of two of my characters were crossed, I encountered many problems with them passing through each other when moving from one pose to the next. I spent a lot of my time correcting this, which was made much easier by my reference videos as I could see the subtle movements in one arm when uncrossing the other. I found keeping he wrist at an almost 90 degree angle was the most realistic way to unfold the arms without having the hand hands pass though the upper arms or the chest.
For both Erin and Michelle, I animated using both FK and IK arms. Michelle’s arms were FK when holding the suitcase so they would follow the movement of the upper body. When she begins to drop the suitcase, I switched to IK so she would be able to lean against the suitcase and still do movements with her torso and legs, such as switching the weight from one leg to the other when standing up straight. For Erin, I switched her left arm to IK when she opens the suitcase. This allowed her to lean on it when bending down as a bit of support.
Camera and Breaking the Fourth Wall:
I originally looked at Modern Family as well as Derry Girls for my animation inspiration. Even though I ended up using an audio from Derry Girls, I wanted to try and incorporate a Modern Family feel into my animation. I tried creating a little bit of a shake in the camera, however, in the end I felt it distracted from the lip syncing, so I made the camera much steadier, but kept a ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’ moment in my animation to include the viewer a little more and emphasise the ‘fed up’ look Erin has.
Overall, I am happy with my first 3D lip sync animation. I do wish I had left myself enough time to try and fix the wrist problem as I feel it is very noticeable, but I am aware of others who had problems with the waitress rig in Maya 2023 so I feel I did the best I could with the rig I used. I learned a lot about using constraints to pick up and put down objects and worked with weight in a way I had never done before.