This assignment, I found myself with much less time to work than I felt comfortable, thankfully I did start working briefly during previous classes on my concept for lip sync and weight lift. Since I felt more confident delving more into 2D I simply chose my lip sync audio and planned designs for it, while I also sketched out a rough 2D animated weight lift to act as a rough idea to translate into my later 3D attempt at a weight lift. I started by watching real life weight lift references and landed on specifically this video on YouTube as a good starting point.https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SjMwhx3ok0k
I continued with looking into more animation references of people lifting heavy weights like this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TK1BoKlzqY
I also looked at other references on youtube of other animators’ weight lifting animation and particularly liked this one as a good reference for later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYmfe5J5zfA
I unfortunately cannot find the files for my initial weight lift sketch in ToonBoom, they might have been not transferred from the University computers since I was there last.
Either way I quickly got to work on putting our classes learning to animate in 3D to use and started my weight lift animation. Previously, especially with the feedback I got back from the lecturers, I did not struggle much with blocking out the poses in 3D or generally using the rigs, but I was slow to figure out polishing the animation via the graph editor and features similar to it, which is noticeable in my previous run animation, with it being mostly keyframes of specific poses. So now I wanted to take some advice from the lecturer and step away into learning the graph editor. It was a struggle at first and quickly would spiral out of control and seem so daunting and confusing, but after trying, restarting and trying again about 3 or 4 times I finally got the hang of it and was making good progress.
I did take more advice from different lecturers between classes before classes ended for Christmas, where I was advised on some poses within the animation that seemed like too large of a jump and needed other frames to bridge the gaps. Eventually, after weeks of chipping away at the graph editor I had finally just about finished my weight lift animation to a standard I was happy with, where the movements looked fleshed out enough to not be jumping or snapping around much, and there were attempts with more detailed parts of the rig like the numerous facial and hand controls for more detail in bringing more life to the movements. Another tip I had remembered from class was steering away from perfect symmetry and movements, so I would choose to have parts of the body linger on movements at times to remove the robotic sense of perfection in some of the movements like the arms swinging or legs bending.
I feel like small touches while animating with this Rig go a long way in the long run to end up with a much more authentic looking and human movements rather than something stiff and robotic.
I am very happy with how this animation turned out, But I can still already understand where I could do better or learn to spend less time stuck on in the future. I feel like I finally understand just how the graph editor is meant to be used for animating with rigs in blender.
While I was working on my weight lift, I was also working on my Lip sync in Toonboom bit by bit. I bounced between a handful of ideas for my chosen audio, first looking at voice acted lines for comics I liked and changing the medium of comic art to 2D animation, and while I enjoyed this idea, I turned my attention to the game series, Portal, as I really enjoyed the wonderful writing and voice acting within the games’ limited cast of very exaggerated characters. I began by listening to clips taken from both Portal one and two, then looking online at other people’s attempts at bringing the characters into 2D animated life, first stumbling back on videos I had viewed ages prior and found to again be very interesting sources of inspiration, a few examples being:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5cLFsBKLSM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFJ5s1bb7UQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufylrzFVtx0
These videos would not only inspire me with how these animators chose to animate the two very opposing characters, Wheatley and Glados, but also just how they drew these two characters with more human designs rather than robot, how these characters moved, spoke and presented themselves in both the games themselves and fan creations helped me in making my own personalised designs for the two characters, but also in deciding that the two characters should be animated very differently because of their vastly different energies in their voices, with one being more calculated, slow and sure of herself, and the other being erratic and energetic, stumbling over his words at times, too.
Analysing the voice clips from the game and these other animations greatly helped in my creative process with my ideas for a Lip sync animation, so now I simply chose a voice clip I enjoyed, was long enough and I could work with enough to get a rich short back and forth conversation between these opposing characters, and I landed on this short audio:
taken from this longer clip online, for more context to the original scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LovYNScgReY&t=488s
Now, my first steps in my creative process were to make simple enough reference sheets for my designs to use later, and after a couple attempts at trying to nail the designs down and taking long looks at other fan creations of the games and how others would go about drawing these characters, I did substantial research into the fan creations of this game for adequate references for my own work. Eventually I landed on these designs below,
I feel like with these I was able to just about nail down the two very different personalities I wished to capture in my lip sync animation to come.
Now I finally felt ready to start blocking out my animation, where I eventually had this rough blocked out sketch of how my three shots would play out as a back and forth between the two characters.
I know that for this assignment we were advised to use one character for the lip sync but with 2D I felt more comfortable to try and push myself and experiment more with back and forth conversations or arguments between two characters to really try and push myself to the next level in feeling more confident with my skills in animating to match audio and lip sync in 2D.
Here I was very happy with how this sketch turned out, but I still had not quite had the animation to the presentable point I wanted it to be in, as it was still only a sketch in a measly 6fps, where I wanted it to be in 24fps animated mostly on twos. So first I worked at tidying the sketch and elevating it to almost double the amount of frames at this point. This took probably the longest time as I really wanted the finished product to look neat enough to where it was understandable what was happening. When I had reached that point I was comfortable to fully focus on smaller details like the eyes, the actual most important part of the project so far, the lip syncing itself, and other touches like the jaw moving up and down alongside the mouth movements.
A part I enjoyed about this project was messing with the two very different styles of mouth and lip sync in the one conversation, with the deliberate choice to animate one character framed further away with his body, head, arms and mouth swinging around more in a much more animated style, similar to the previous fan animations I had been researching into previously, and the other character being contrasting in her slower more precise movements, with her mouth almost always being stuck in a constant scowl as she speaks. I feel like through decisions like these I was able to effectively capture the two battling personalities in this audio clip and use the freeing creativity 2D allows for you to have to push the personalities of the voices more with the way the characters are animated along with it.
Another step in the process of this animation which I think is important to mention is that I did also take advice from the classes to record myself doing the movements I wanted to animate these characters doing, I don’t feel like putting the whole recordings up here as they are not very good but I can at least give these two screenshots of me focusing on how the arm swinging around near the start of the animation would look.
With this assignment I believe I was able to keep up the work steadily until my deadline and I think it did really help to have the creative liberty to chose what mediums you prefer to do either animation in, choosing what audio and how you want to animate to it really help in keeping my interest in the project going as I genuinely did feel very accomplished each step of the way and always wanted to keep working more and pushing my work as far as I could muster with the time I had until the very end. Unfortunately I did have to make use of an extension as close to the deadline I fell ill and bedridden for days but still it did not stop me as soon as I felt well enough to stand looking at a screen or sitting up in a chair I got right back into animating in Toonboom and Blender. Both of these software, after these two animations, I do feel like I understand how the Blender and Toonboom animation pipeline works even more than I did before and I feel like I am much more acquainted with the different animation features on both software.
Overall, I am very pleased with how this assignment has turned out on my end and am very proud of the final products I have made. I do already see how I would do this better if I started with the knowledge of these software I have now and I’m just happy to think how I already feel about these works, I think give a couple months I could make animations leagues better than what I am at now. I think I can finally say that I understand Toonboom enough to competently animate in it and Blender I finally understand how the graph editor and the later stages of the animation pipeline in blender work past just blocking out the key poses.