My next assignment within Acting for Animation was to produce a lip sync to a 5 second audio clip. We were given free reign to choose from a variety of sound bites. I eventually settled on one of a monstrous voice saying “I Smell Human”.

I went back and forward over this audio clip and a few others for a little while. I toyed with the idea of doing a cowboy audio clip and a hedonistic wine drinker. I even started sketching out potential character designs. The old woman was maybe based a bit too much of Ursula from Little Mermaid.

After I had a closer look into what lip syncing entailed I decided the wine tasting audio clip would be a lot of work for my first time and I already had a clear idea what I wanted to do with the “I Smell Human” audio, plus time wasn’t on my side. I had a week before hand-in and didn’t want to faff about too much longer. I decided to stick with I smell Human and get stuck into the character design.

The image I had in my head was of a demon in a chefs outfit opening a silver platter with a cooked human head on it. I looked at a few sources for inspiration from Earthworm Jim, The Simpsons, Leo and Satan and Smiling Friends.

I wasn’t trying to replicate the graphic primal shape designs I’d used in my previous animation. In fact I was drawing in a style more closely related to my own comic style.

However I hated a lot of these designs and felt they were very uninspired and boring. I eventually found myself steering back to simpler primal shape designs I’d used before. It works better for animating and since the focus of the animation was on getting the lip sync right I didn’t want to over complicate it.

This was the design I eventually settled on. It wasn’t anything special but it didn’t immediately make my eyes bleed when I looked at it so it was good enough to continue with.

Once I had my design I started looking at mouth charts online. I was a little unsure about this process as I couldn’t find a concrete guide for how mouth shapes were meant to look, obviously part of this is due to variations in character designs but I was surprised how open ended it felt.

With a rough guide I started on making my own mouth chart for my demon.

William’s Animator’s Survival Guide had an extremely helpful section on lip syncing and mentioned the importance of popping into your vowels, basically using the vowels as your timeline for the “beats” of speaking. So I broke my audio clip down into it’s vowels.

I also wanted a bit of character animation before and after the lip sync so filmed some reference in the living room of myself smelling the platter and removing the lid. I knew I wanted big flamboyant arcs with the arm movements.

I created a rough animatic which turned out looking like this:

I wasn’t too keen on how it looked. The lip sync seemed really janky and stiff to me so I sent it to Sarah for some feedback and this is what she said:

Sarah’s main advice was to tweak the timing and soften the mouth shapes. William’s recommends softening the mouth shapes after you hit the vowels. This helped a lot and allowed me to fill the space between my mouth shapes so they didn’t just ‘hang’ there.

Once I had the mouth shapes sorted I worked moved onto the rest of the character animation. I knew a wanted a big sweeping arc as the demon lifted the lid off the platter so I blocked out the movement with some skeleton joints first before actually animating it. One thing I remember specifically from my earlier animations was how William’s quoted Milt Kahl on adding flexibility into the arm movements by breaking the elbow and having it lead in the arc. So I wanted to include it this time around.

 

With the arc nailed down I just had to add the arm, the platter contents and a little bit of polish.

In conclusion this one is a bit of a mixed bag. The strongest part is the character animation, the lip sync looks fine in of the sense it matches the timing of the audio but it lacks a bit of character in my eyes. If I had another week I would have probably added a bit more polish to the animation, eye blinks, steam from the head and bit more elasticity into the demon’s face when he speaks. His body just seems to pause while he’s speaking, maybe a bit of sway in the hands  and some head movement would have helped to breathe a bit more life into him.

The brief for this module required us to animating two characters of different ages, personalities and professions interacting together at a bus stop. One thing Sarah mentioned during the lecture was the characters didn’t have to be human. This of course led me to devise a scenario where a man and his dog are waiting at the bus stop next to an alien disguised under a heavy coat. The dog begins sniffing the alien who pushes him away with his foot, the dog responds by pulling the disguise off the alien causing the dog to jump with shock into the man’s arms ALA Scooby-Doo.

Sarah provided the template for the background so I just had to design the characters. I wanted to steer further into the bold flat design I had with my rat in my animation JAM. While the rat design was very 00’s Nickelodeon for my new designs I wanted to keep the strong shape language but with thinner lines. I pulled a lot of inspiration from Barry Reynold’s designs on Book of Kell’s (2009).

Reynold’s designs are iconic and have so much appeal even before they start moving. I really liked how Reynold does larger character’s with rounded shoulders broken up by the head shape and wanted to incorporate them in my own character. I worked out some sketches in my bed late one night. The man’s came together fairly quickly and so did the dog. I really steered into basic shape design with these characters and since I knew we’d be seeing them standing together in an almost line-up I made sure to keep their designs complementally of each other. Each character had a circle, square or triangle shape at the core of their design. The alien was the hardest design to crack. I knew I wanted a long and spindly design with large hat and coat concealing his face. I looked at A Monster in Paris (2011) for inspiration.

After a few sketches I just couldn’t get a design that was as strong as I had with the man and dog. Eventually the image of a rocket lolly popped into my head and gave me the inspiration to boil the shape language down to it’s simplest form, which gave me this:
I was a lot happier with this design and I felt it worked well next to the man and dog.

I took the designs and brought them into Photoshop where I worked them up and added some colour. I knew I wasn’t going to be using colour in the final animation but there was always the possibility of adding colour after the hand-in, plus it’s just too much fun not to colour them!

With my designs out of the way, the next stage was onto animating. I made an animatic to give me an idea of the staging and timing. I knew the man wasn’t going to do much movement outside playing on his phone and catching the dog when he jumps. I got a little caught up in getting his fingers to move right while he was on his phone and ended up filming some reference before I started my animatic. I didn’t really need to get the finger animations to the level that I did at this stage but it didn’t effect my pipeline and in fact it just meant I got them out of the way earlier.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XxuyIwKxJwI

For the animatic I only included a few frames of the finger animation but for the whole short I intended to have them on an alternating loop.

The timing for some actions was seriously off but the staging was good and it gave me enough of a foundation to begin working. My first hurdle was getting the dog to turn around and walk. Quadrupeds are tricky to animate so I looked at a few photos and videos of dogs turning around to give me a reference.

https://www.facebook.com/WoofWoofTV/videos/golden-retriever-puppy-listens-and-dances-to-turn-around-song/194901752028078/

To make it simpler for myself I broke the dogs body down into it’s most basic form and thought about his torso like a sausage twisting around on itself. For the walk animation I looked at a walk cycle for quadrupeds and the standard walk cycle.

I understood the basics for the walk was alternating leg poses and I was surprised by how straight forward I found the process. The walk I created for my square dog ended up being something between a human’s walk and a dogs. I didn’t want square dog to have backwards joints so gave him human legs, I was a little concerned with how it’d appear and whether it might come across as creepy but it worked out in the end.

The rest of the animation was pretty much straight forward until I got to the part where the alien has to push the dog away with his leg. In my original plan the alien pushes the dog away with an arcing sweep.

But after looking at it I realised the logistics of the movement didn’t make sense, the sweep felt like he’d be pushing the dog behind him rather than away. Since I was working on a 2D plane I needed a kick that fit within those dimensions. I asked Sarah to film reference of me in the office kicking away a chair so I could have some idea of how it’d look.

With my new reference as a guide this is what I was able to change the push into.

I liked the leg movement and the animation on the scarf but I really didn’t the squash on the dog so I decided to push it further and really squish him when he gets pushed.

The next section I worked on was the dog bite. While I was working on it I showed my progress to my co-workers and they suggested these changes.

So the dogs sniff became this:

And the bite became this:

Next stage was the tug on the alien’s coat.

Unfortunately the only clip I have from this stage is 1 second long but you can see the main issue if you watch the clip frame by frame. The clothes fly off too fast, there isn’t much reaction from the scarf being pulled and the alien looks very stiff as it coming out of the spin. So in my next pass I added a lot more spring to the alien to give him life coming out of the spin and I slowed down the clothes.

I showed what I’d done so far to Sarah and my co-workers and got this feedback.

This made me realise I’ve been having an issue with the timing in a lot of my animation, I tend to make ever movement very even and with the same amount of frames. This was especially noticeable in the dogs jump. But by deleting a few frames and holding the pose for longer at the top of the jump I was able to get a better result. I also implemented the feedback about the scarf, the leg and the dog tugging. Due to time reasons I didn’t add more reactions to the alien but I feel the end result still works. Below is the final version of my animation.

I realised when I finished the animation in true Aodhan fashion I gave myself a good bit more work than I probably needed to do, the brief said the sequence only needed to be 10 seconds and mine comes in at 30. But all in all I’m mostly happy with this piece. The character designs are strong, the staging is good. Some of the timing is a little lifeless in some parts and I’m not entirely convinced by some of the movements in the tug of war between the alien and dog. I think the scarf tension in the end looked a lot better but the way the man and dog move during the tugging, their back and forth just seems a little off too me.

I do really life how much life the animation has towards the end with the alien’s bounce and the man catching the dog. Although it has made me realise the rest of the animation is a kind of stiff and lifeless by comparison. I noticed it with my animation JAM too, the nicer more fluid animations are always towards the end. I think it might have something to do with the fact both of those animations featured a walk animation in the middle which I tend to only redraw the legs on so the rest appears as the a singular drawing moving across the screen. Either that or it takes me a hell of a long time to warm up with my animation. Whatever the reason I’m marking this animation down as a win, it’s a clear progression from my previous work, if still a little stiff/unappealing. Perhaps more exaggeration is needed.