I gathered together three short videos for possible lipsync audios, then asked my friends for a second opinion.
The consensus was that the John Mulaney quote should be used as it was one person (not conversational) and most of the runtime was dialogue.
I then took reference photos of myself to match up with the words.
“‘Cuz there’s a horse
“loose
“in the
“hospital!
“It’s never happened before!
“No one knows what the horse is gonna do next!
“Least of all
“the horse!”
I also used the advice and reference drawings given in this video:
As well as some screenshots from class PowerPoint slides.
Using Toon Boom, I drew out the poses alongside the words, changing a few of the later poses to better fit the emotion I wanted to convey. The lip sync references and advice helped me achieve the smooth animation of the mouth.
Poses:
Satisfied with this progress, I then added in-betweens to smooth out the body animation.
Inbetweens:
The finishing touch on the sketch was the jaw movement, which I split into 1, 2 and 3 – 1 being the smallest movement and 3 being the jaw for a wide open mouth.
Full sketch:
At this point, I asked Aodhan for notes, and he gave me some pointers;
- Add different follow-through rates (one hand reaches destination before the other)
- Clean up lines
On the line ‘in the hospital’, I added some delay to the hand on the right side of the screen, so to make it less perfect and mechanical. Clean lines were added too.
Static line:
Again, the last thing to do was the jaw. I animated it on a separate layer to the head and then deleted the overlapping lines.
Final animation:
Full development:
Overall, this process went very smoothly and I enjoyed it much more than I expected. The Domics tutorial was very helpful, and the only thing I would change if I had more time would be adding more fluidity in the body movements – but as that was not the purpose of the animation assignment, I left it to a minimum.