Animation Student *u*
I modelled a quick newspaper, post-it notes, clipboard, telephone and Gun at the request of Ryan, and I was also in contact with Edward:
I have taken most of the responsibility of chatting to Edward and organising our sound for the game. All of our music is now finished, and hopefully should be in the final build of the vertical slice.
References:
Final Animation, Including portfolio link:
Art Station – Lip Sync Animation.
Animation for the Creative Industries – Beginning Lip Sync Assignment
Lip Sync Animation – Mixing up lip sync audio, preparing timing for lip syncing.
Lip Sync Animation – In between frames, cleaning up timing, line art
Self Reflection:
I was pretty determined to get audio that fit the two characters that I am using for my animation assignments this year: I was really excited and had a pretty clear idea of what I was going to go for when I heard the audio I used. I am extremely grateful to Alec for giving me the idea of the office drone segment, and for suggesting I add her throwing the battery over her shoulder, as I believe that these changes solidified the narrative I was aiming for.
Over all, I’m happy with how this turned out – this was my first attempt at lip syncing, and I gave myself almost double the amount of seconds to animate for the assignment – I believe this came out well, I worked incredibly hard on it. I like the movement that I applied to both Ali and Gigabyte, I feel that I managed to portray acting in their segments. Additionally, I was determined to use more of a range of software to complete this animation, and I jumped between Adobe Animate, Rough Animator, and used Procreate only for clean up and I’m really pleased that I stuck with that. I’ve found using Adobe Animate very challenging, but much more effective.
That being said, there’s a lot I want to improve upon: I think that the lip sync itself could have been much better. I found myself struggling quite a bit to keep the lip sync movement in good time with the character’s acting movements, I think the lip sync itself suffered as a consequence. I should have animated the mouth movements on different layers. I’m also pretty unhappy with how flat and un-dynamic everything feels, I would love to spend a bit more time next time focusing on camera movement, more interesting camera angles, as I feel very self conscious about how simple and flat my animations feel over all. I also don’t feel that my drawing is particularly strong in these animations.
In conclusion, I feel a little self-conscious about my abilities with this one, however I’m pleased with how far I’ve come since first semester and proud of this first attempt at a lip sync animation.
I moved on to animating the rest of Gigabyte’s monologue next:
I played around a lot more with the timing here, and also added some inbetween frames here and there to smooth out the movement of his shutting down segment, to make it smoother.
I then moved on to animating Ali’s segment. I brought in her segment individually, and cleaned up my rough pass of her movement, moving it to and from procreate to adobe animate just to check on timings, work out what extra frames i had to work with in terms of her movement and her lip sync:
I went back into my previous feedback from Alec, as Ali is performing much the same action in this sequence: she’s kneeling down. Alec had suggested that for such a quick movement, she should maybe squash a little bit more when she comes down to her kneeling pose and then bounce back up, just to emphasise that quick movement.
After I was happy with the roughs, I cleaned up Ali’s segment and brought it into adobe animate to finish it up:
I decided that I wanted to try and follow the style of some of Studio Meala’s videos whilst I made this animation:
I notice that they have quite scratchy textures to their lines, and that they have a slight blur to them which gives them a very soft look. I tried my best to imitate this. I also wanted to try and draw frame by frame as much as I could — I was aware that this would be a great time sink, but I want those scratchy lines to have some subtle movement, I want it to appear hand drawn. I think it adds a little character. I did this specifically in the office drone interim, and I like the way that turned out.
I worked on some clean up in between frames for a little more clarity on movement and timing for the animation I already had:
Alec suggested that she should throw the battery over her shoulder as it would make her action of removing the battery more obvious. I also removed and fixed up a lot of frames here with his hand movements, as they were very stuttered movements and it didn’t look great – I sacrificed a lot of the specific mouth movements in favor of gesture and I think it paid off ultimately, as I still feel his words are readable.
I started by lining the robot office drone portion of the animation:
I then moved on to the first section of the animation, where I sacrificed a few more frames just to further smooth out his movement whilst he’s speaking:
I’m happier with this section, however I will submit it when it’s finished for some more feedback as I think potentially there still might be a little too much hand movement in his beginning monologue. I also want to try and add some more motion lines, as I’ve noticed that this is a feature in a lot of the studio meala references I’ve been looking at!
References and resources:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/animate-discussions/importing-image-sequences-to-animate-cc/td-p/9626881
I made up the time clock and punch card for my team, which will be used to access save files and ‘clock on’ for their shift (begin their game). I paid particular attention to the following references:
I also referenced the following for the overhead fluorescent Light: