Research:
For the animation style, I didn’t want to go for any specific style especially anything too exaggerated. I wanted to keep the animation style more basic. I think this helps improve my basic animation skills and also gives me practice for my idea of my final year project.
reference:
So for my reference I thought it would be best to record myself playing out the scene in the way I had imagined so that I had footage to base my animation off. The scene was pretty basic, I didn’t want to copy the original breaking bad footage exactly. However I did use the original scene as reference for the mouth animations as the footage is much clearer and its easier to see how the mouths were moving. There is one point of the dialogue; ‘You’re Heisenberg’ which is kind of hard to see the mouth. To get round this I just recorded myself saying that one line then slowed it down.
Development:
I first started out by laying out the scene, I imported the two buzz and woody rigs along with the table and chairs. Then just spent a bit of time posing the rigs and trying to set up camera angles. Once the scene was ready I started with the head movements of woody, so I took the reference footage and imported it into premiere pro, this allowed me to go frame by frame. Once I had the head movements down I wanted to finish the body animation which was just the pointing scene. I didn’t put too much time into the arm lifting as I knew I was gonna to make a slight cut to this later, so I mainly focused on the hand pointing. Next I went back and started working on the lip sync. I started with the shortest bit of dialogue then worked my way up to the longest. I used both of the reference footage to copy the mouth. Some of the dialogue was easy enough to match but other parts were tricky. The timing was hard to get right, I tried going frame by frame and and listen to when each sound was pronounced. Once woody was finished I created a new layer for all of buzz’s keyframes. I took a few more passes again to try and refine the animation. I then added some simply lighting and tried rendering, although in the Arnold preview I noticed a problem with the textures. Both rigs were extremely shiny so I went into the hypershade and change the reflectiveness of all of the textures.
Final outcome:
I’m not sure what happened to the colour in the final render, as the Arnold preview displayed a different colour. While the rendered clip seems over saturated. I also only noticed after the render that the textures for the table and chair weren’t working right. However I didn’t have time to try and fix the lighting and re render, but I think the final outcome was decent anyway.