For this class and the outline of the assignment I first planned and made a list of ideas towards what would be easiest to animate and fit well with an audio piece. This also included what material I would enjoy working with the most. I wanted this piece of work to be different than my normal output of work something interesting and slightly challenging with how contrast the topic would be.
I started by researching my favourite audio clips from movies although I wanted to frame my work around something original such as recording of a song I had written on the guitar. I didn’t have a piece of original audio recorded during this time and I decided that a song would be do hard to animate in the time frame given. I proceeded to star an unoriginal piece of audio and did a rough animation test of the character Sarah from the movie labyrinth speaking some of the last lines of the film here with this practice I got an outline of how to arrange a facial movement although I didn’t feel inspired by this piece so I decided to change what I was animating to continue forward.
After a while of searching through movie clips. I eventually created an original piece a clip of audio that my friends and I had made by accident when making a joke over voice call. I found this audio to be very entertaining and funny and decided to plan around creating a fictional story and comedic skit around two characters from this audio. I framed this audio in mind of one tall guy and one small guy thinking in context of golem from lord of the rings. I decided to theme this animation skit around the topic of the audio which was grippers. I then planned out other aspects such as a medieval fantasy setting with an uncomfortable style to add a creepy and gross comedic output using old “SpongeBob” episodes as a reference especially towards character interactions and acting. I researched how to set up the scene to add more or an emotional impact to when the character begins to speak. I did this by adding a silent start of animation filler to the lip sync animatic this overall gave context to the audio and created a short story. Trying to keep within the limits of 8-11 seconds was difficult as I got very inspired by this piece.
Lip sync studies and research:
Gathering research, I started with aiming the characters around the audio mainly by looking up images of golem from lord of the rings and movie clips or other animations/ animatics that would help frame the idea I had in mind. I specifically found anime characters with pointed teeth which helped create the design for my characters mouth and acting when moving. The pointed teeth helped give the character more personality. I had found and animation channel who focused on comedic and simple animated characters that I thought would be a good outline for style and design simplicity. This animation channel is called “worthy kids” I also believed that the content of my audio piece narratively and stylised fit what content “worth kids” had been making I used this as a bases.
Gathering more research specifically setting of the scene I had found “Monty python and the holy grail” from the movie I specifically used the scene of the bridge where a goblin like character stopped the heroes of the story from crossing the bridge. I believed this dynamic would work well in my skit and proceeded sketch out some practical designs of two characters from my reference images and environment designs. I made them fit into the style and aim I was looking for in terms of animated content and simplicity however I continued my research to better give expressions to my character looking through YouTube video and tutorials on lip syncing I learnt a lot from “Domics” YouTube channel the video around lip syncing helped me greatly. Finally having made a rough animatic I had the final design of the characters one being a goblin and the other a knight who is trying to cross the bridge.
Practice and problem solving:
Putting this material into practice was slightly difficult as I struggled to time the lip movements correct to my audio piece due to how unclear and fast the audio segments were. Here I decided to stop my practice and used the audacity software to clean up the audio so I could better hear it in order to correctly animate the words and movements of the lips of the character speaking.
From previous experience in order To do this I used some simple effects in audacity such as normalise, noise reduction, de noise, vocal enhancer and automatic pitch correction to clear up all the phone static, microphone bussing overlapping of the pitch and background noise. overall, this made the audio clear and better to understand when it came to animating
Because of the time constraint I decided mainly to cut out any possibility of the second character to speak and focused heavily on the movements and personality of the main character speaking, the Goblin addressing Robert the knight. I decided to aim for the character being slightly flirtatious, gross, and uncomfortable. I did this by using simple eyebrow accents to draw attention to the emotion behind the words but held off on moving the eyes for periods of time as to give impact to the close-up scenes for an uncanny staring effect at the audience. I also was able to add more emphasis to the body language g by using less frames to make the acting in the movement’s more ecstatic and direct.
FIXING THE AUDIO /CLEANUP
Framing and progress
Framing the scenes themselves by straight ahead animation became fun and creative it overall saved me time and I didn’t feel the need to make a storyboard as I felt like drawing new ideas while working through it and overall decided to use most of them. by watching through the scene I liked in Monty python and drew out the backgrounds from there I stuck the characters in and positioned the camera angles in shots that added emphasis to the character speaking. The Goblin being small and strangely obsessed. Using pyramid compositional shots and long shots before closeups I made sure the movements were snappy close to the screen and set to the side for discomfort. I wanted to frame the shots in an uncomfortable way that directly addressed the audience making them feel as if they were Robert being talked too. I did this for comedic effect before getting personal with the extreme close ups of the lip sync. I also made sure to frame shots that expressed personality of the characters differently without having to add context mainly setting them up without words for how these characters would interact, their body language and how they were different from one another for example the knight had more wide shots, centre compositions and heroic stances whereas the goblin had slightly off centred compositions more to the left low down close up shots to re-arrange the impact that he was talking to the left of him and was greatly smaller than the knight.
Animating
The animating process went smoothly enough as I cut time by re pasting and using the same poses only with incremental changes on the face until I got to the main acting part of the animation near the end lines. All of this was done to add a darting and still anticipation to the characters next words. I overall kept the simplicity of the animation to round simple shapes the hardest part was adjusting to the lip movements correctly to the audio as the audio piece was rather fast, so I had a lot of words to implement. trying to fit many mouths poses into short seconds of scenes was very difficult specifically because the characters vocals sounded lot of “S” sounding words trying to add teeth to the moth poses while trying to keep the word pronunciations became and annoying task my main focus went towards this and in the last ending scene I had to leave out animating facial features.
FINAL:
Evaluation and self-critique
Overall, I think I did well and choose a fun exciting and good audio track that could show of the acting and creativity of my animation. the Vocals have a lot of emotion that best demonstrated my acting abilities in animation. I believe I could have improved by practicing out more lip sync animation to better understand mouth movement and the timing of it alongside audio. This was because I greatly struggled to match the audio up properly and unfortunately cut time where I could have done more facial expressions this is an improvement; I need to be more efficient with when creating unique lip syncs. However, with the time frame I had for this I think I did good aiming to meet most of the criteria for this class.