For this module, we can choose whether to do 3d or 2d. As I’m so used to animating in 2d I believe that I’ll be doing this for every animation. I’m also going to be using toon boom instead of Krita as I believe that learning it now will be a lot more rewarding in the future as it’s an industry standard.
I found this youtube channel called Zebirdbrain (https://www.youtube.com/@ZeBirdBrain/videos) who makes a lot of very informative tutorial videos on how to use toon boom which has made me more comfortable with the software.
Box lift
This video is good because it has notes and arrows and the guy acts in a non-serious manner which I believe will look well animated. The only problem is that I think this would be easier to animate in blender as the camera is slightly angled and animated a rectangular box in 2d will be a little tricky so I may experiment with both 2d and 3d to see which comes out better.
For the 2d, I was struggling to get the poses right so I tried drawing each key pose on paper and then transferring them to digital.
Drawing didn’t match with the pose at all.
More accurate sketches.
This is my attempt at animating it with keyframes and getting the timing right and I believe that it’s coming along swell. I was struggling a little with the perspective of the box and where the feet should be but I believe that by spreading the feet apart more makes the box look heavier.
character jumping
I’m choosing this reference as it’s simple and the person has a ponytail similar to my character so I’ll be able to use it as reference.
This is my first attempt at a run and jump and I believe that it turned out quite well. I think that some parts are the tiniest bit too slow but I’ll be asking my lecturer for a second opinion.
lip-sync
For the lip-sync part of of the module, my first thought straight away was that I wanted to animate to the Red Flags music video as I find the lyrics and the way the characters act very goofy and I believe it’d be fun to animate my characters acting silly to this song.
For my first animatic for what I want to go for, I did it before the class explained what the lip-sync video was supposed to be like so I wasn’t aware that we had to animate the entirety of the characters body. I might have to redo this but I do really like how silly the facial expressions are so I’ll be keeping them.
For the actual lip-sync, I’ll be using this as a reference as it gives an idea of what mouth shape matches with every letter and it’s very simple and straight forward to follow.
I really like how the lip-sync turned out as I believe I got the timing down really well.
Feedback
The lecturer said that the jump looks more like a hop than a run and leap. The way I can fix this is by making the character jump higher and maybe fall a little faster but since I made my character too big, I’ll have to change the canvas size to make it work.
The lecturer said that the animatic and timing are solid but the character walking slightly at the end makes the box not look heavy. He said to get rid of the walk as it’s not needed. He also said to be careful with the angles of the box as the angle changes are a little extreme.
While animating the lip-sync, I wanted my characters to have the same facial expression while talking, but by doing so resulted in the corners of the characters mouth not moving that much. This made it look like the characters mouths were just opening and closing. I was told that characters mouths still move a lot even when they only have one facial expression. To fix this, I’m going to look at more references and also look at myself in a mirror while doing the mouth shapes myself to understand how they move more realistically.
Run and Jump Improved
I wasn’t able to make my canvas bigger in toon boom so I lowered the ground instead and made the character jump higher. I also realised that there’s too much build up at the beginning of the jump which makes the character lose all momentum from the run so I got rid of some of the frames so the character jumps faster.
I believe by doing this makes the timing less slow and more realistic and I may start cleaning the animation up now. I also want my character to have a ponytail as secondary motion adds a lot more movement and makes the animation more interesting.
Lifting the Box Improved
When adding in-betweens, I had to change the timing a bit as when the character is smoothly lifting the box it makes it seem too light so I had to make the the box lift longer. I also had to change the pose by making the head hang back a lot more to seem like the character is putting in a lot more effort.
For the box angles, I had to guess as my shot is slightly different from the reference video but I believe that I did a decent job as the box does look like it’s rotating.
Lip-sync Improved
I believe that I fixed the problem a bit by moving the corners of the mouth more and changing the size of it more often so that it doesn’t just look like it’s opening and closing.
I also made my characters move around a little more to give them more life and emotion while talking.
Run and jump finished
I like the improved momentum s it looks like she is running and jumping. I love adding secondary motion as it makes her seem like she has more weight. I like how this came out.
Lifting the box finished
I added my characters face to give the character a bit more emotion. I also added secondary motion to the characters hair to add more movement. As I analysed my reference thoroughly frame by frame while animating, I like how it paid off as my character moves really well throughout the animation.
lip sync finished
I really like the emotions I gave my characters in this and how overly paranoid the guy looks while the girl looks fairly normal adds comedy and makes the animation come across as goofy. I added a bit more movement as I think the lip-sync looks better when the characters are moving. I really like how this turned out.
Final thoughts
I really like how my animations turned out, but if I were to do them again, I would probably clean up the line art to make them look cleaner and more like finished animations because I usually think my sketches look better but I may need to break out of this habit if I want to improve. I also think I should’ve looked at more references as I followed the references I had thoroughly, I didn’t really add anything different or creative to them.