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.