The third animation we were tasked with doing for our second assignment was a lip sync using roughly 8 to 10 seconds of dialogue of our choosing. We were told before that out of the three animations we were assigned, lip syncs take the longest to to make, so going in I knew I would have to put in more effort into this one than with the other animations to complete my work on time and to a good standard.
Initially, I was planning on recording dialogue myself and animating a character to my own voice as I do voice acting as a hobby. However, we were also provided a folder of different audio meant to help us if we couldn’t find any dialogue in time for animating. I decided to check each audio file out of curiosity, and upon listening to the one titled “Don’t Take Offense” I thought of a wolf character named Dutch from an upcoming video game called “Billie Bust Up” by Blueprint Studios. I felt that Dutch suited the voice line perfectly, and I decided to use him for my lip sync.
Dutch is described as a “hearty and cheerful owner of a large lavish hotel” and “an accomplished (and well feared) businessman”, also having a “criminal career to keep under wraps!” (Blueprint Games, 2023). From this description, I pictured Dutch to have a classy, professional personality, which I then melded with the criminal history aspect to give him small bursts of aggression and violence in his body language, which can be seen in my lip sync of him. Furthermore, the content that has been shown of Dutch also portrays him as a singer and performer on a stage, so I also decided to include very dramatic, showman-like movements mainly through his hands as his gestures complement his words and mood shifts.
Below are my initial references for learning how to draw and animate Dutch. Since he is designed to be in a 3D style video game, I mainly looked at 2D drawings and animations to help with drawing him accurately.
PureRef References
Reference links:
https://x.com/BillieBustUp/status/1504656450890653701?s=20
https://x.com/BillieBustUp/status/1574826380365369344?s=20
https://x.com/BillieBustUp/status/1626162362121089025?s=20
In addition, I looked into a reference for the hand motion I planned where Dutch flexes his fingers and shows his claws. Below is the video reference and timestamp for this particular motion.
00:11 – 00:12
Furthermore, the poses I had in mind were very specific, so I recorded myself doing the body movements multiple times as a reference, which can be seen below.
A challenge I would also face with animating Dutch is lip syncing an animal character. In our class practices, we mainly only focused on human mouth shapes, however Dutch’s lip movements had to be animated differently due to his canine muzzle. So, I did some research and found a reference guide image by a user on Deviant Art under the name of “DarkmaneTheWerewolf”, featuring many mouth shapes for several different mouth types, which I decided to use as reference for animating my lip sync.
Below is the lip sync reference sheet.
Below are the initial key poses I had drawn in Clip Studio Paint and the finished animation I had made in Toon Boom, along with an extra render showing my initial roughs for the character posing.
Roughs Examples–
Key posing & audio syncing-
Final Animation-
Due to certain setbacks was facing in the semester, I wasn’t able to start working on my animations until later on, and as a result I couldn’t get much critique from my lecturers. However, when I was able to show my early work on the assignment, I was given positive feedback on both my keyframes and my character’s acting. Thus, I felt more confident in my capabilities moving on in my production.
To summarize my work, I found animating this lip sync to be incredibly challenging due to the many moving parts of the body and my time constraints, along with it taking the most time out of my three animations to do, but also very rewarding as I am proud of the effort I put in with the fluent movement of the lip sync and the acting I was able to portray, which is why I put most of my focus into this animation as it is something I plan on using for my portfolio during our next semester when I apply for placement.
Reference list-
- Billie Bust Up! (2022) [Twitter] March 18th. Available at: https://x.com/BillieBustUp/status/1504656450890653701?s=20 (Accessed at: 5/12/23)
- Billie Bust Up! (2022) [Twitter] September 27th. Available at: https://x.com/BillieBustUp/status/1574826380365369344?s=20 (Accessed at: 5/12/23)
- Billie Bust Up! (2023) [Twitter] February 16th. Available at: https://x.com/BillieBustUp/status/1626162362121089025?s=20 (Accessed at: 5/12/23)
- blueghost aidan (2022) wish dragon – din vs pockets with gold hand. Available at: https://youtu.be/KbQws0t-avk?si=e_axamjCJ95H5wjf (Accessed at: 5/12/23)
- Blueprint Games (2023) Kickstarter. Available at: Billie Bust Up! – A Musical 3D Platformer 🎶 by Blueprint Games — Kickstarter (Accessed at: 7/1/24)
- DarkmaneTheWerewolf. (2012) Lip-Sync – Mouth reference. Available at: Lip-Sync – Mouth reference by DarkmaneTheWerewolf on DeviantArt (Accessed at: 5/12/23)