Research Phase

For this part of the Assignment, I was tasked with creating an 8 second animation where the animation had to include lip sync. So, I started for audio that I can use for my animation. When searching it was very difficult to find audio that sounded interesting and had potential for an animation. However, I ended up using the first 8 seconds of the audio from this video. The reason why I chose this on was because the person that was performing this promo matched with one of my characters which is also a wrestler. Alongside that also having good potential for animation.

For the subject of my animation, I wanted to use my character Laurence simply because of the audio matching with my character’s personality as he is the antagonist for the series that I want to make one day once I am done with university. In the final animation, I have omitted some part of the attire simply because, I wanted to give him a redesign, as I felt that his old design was less interesting.

So, then I downloaded the audio using an MP3 converter website and put it into audacity where, I shortened the length of the audio down to 8 seconds. Then, I began to record myself with the audio. Specifically, I wanted to get the motion down right for the animation to have a much better reference for when I am animating my character to make sure that he looks solid. For the reference videos, I specifically wanted to create both a clear silhouette and create clear arcs of motion for exaggerated purposes to give more life to the animation.

Planning out

Immediately, I got to making a storyboard. The simple reason for this was, to try and get an idea for the motion of the character. When making this, I also used the video reference which helped a lot with the planning out phase as it allowed me to create strong key poses. Here is the final result of my storyboard. Looking back it now, there were some changes made during the process of the animation. The biggest of them all is the end pose as it uses a similar pose as the one on the fourth panel. The reason for this was simply for saving time animating.

Animating

With the storyboard done, I moved onto starting out the animation. For this animation, I used Clip Studio Paint for the animation as I liked the program’s animation feature as it was simple to use and very intuitive. To prepare for the animation, I first had to create a canvas by going onto File and New. This prompted me with a window which allowed me to create the canvas size I want. Of course, I used a preset that I have create specifically for animation purpose. Once selected, I hit create. I then immediately imported each frame of the storyboard by simply dragging it in the open window of the program alongside with the audio for the animation. However, I came face to face with my first hurdle of this as it did not want to play the audio for the animation. However, this was a simple fix as I had to enable Play all frames by going into the animation tab at the top and selecting Playback Settings. Once it was done, I could hear the audio for the animation. Then created a timeline by going at the bottom of the screen. This will allow me to create a folder for animation frames to go in.

With that, I first began drawing over the storyboard frames as they were good enough for the main key poses. Then, I spread them apart on the timeline to get an idea of where the poses change for each section for the audio. When making it, I first made just the body so I can get the body physics down first before I move onto things like eyes, hair and mouth. This is the rough sketch.

Once, I was satisfied with the result, I began to add more frames to the animation, to create a smoother motion, alongside adjusting the timing of the animation to get it to feel right when in motion. Timing is very important when it comes to voice delivery as it can be used to emphasis certain parts of the words. Once, I was satisfied with the body motion, I moved onto the hair, eyes as they were the simple to do in contrast to the mouth as the eye and hair didn’t need much movement. In contrast the mouth was the hardest part as I had to constantly play the animation over and over to get an idea of what mouth shape would follow next as the program did have the scrubbing feature which means that the audio doesn’t play when moving your cursor on each frame at a fast rate. So I had to somewhat guess the timing of each mouth and what mouth shape to use.

Once, I was done with the refined sketch, I moved onto the line art. For it, I had individually separated each part of the character as, there are layers for the body, eyes, hair and mouth to allow me much more control in case there was a mistake in the animation that needed to be fixed.

After the line art was done, I move onto the colouring phase. It was probably was a hard part as I had to individually colour each layer of the character. I wasn’t sure how to speed up the process but, I got through it at the end.

Lastly, the render part. For the shading, I created a folder for where I can put all of the finished assets into the folder and then create a new animation timeline, and clipped it with all the assets for the animation and set the layer style to multiply. This allowed me to shade the character a lot quicker and speed up my process. For the background, I used it from an old animation as it was a fighting arena which matched with the wrestler idea. Lastly added a few gradients to create some lights and shadows and export the animation. Here is the final result.

Conclusion

Overall, I am pretty happy with the end result that I have created for this assignment. The parts that I liked the most about it were the final render as I really liked the lighting effects in the animation. Another thing that liked was how I prepared myself with things like references for the motion to give me an understanding for how I would animate the character. The thing that I did not like about this project was the approach to colouring as I felt overwhelmed by the amount of layers I had to colour. Another one is that, I had to many line art layers and it was easy for me to sometimes create mistakes and draw on the wrong layer. To improve on this, I will do more research on how to animate and colour more efficiently. However, I am still happy that I got to create this, as I learned a lot from this experience.