For this assignment I decided to animate a piece of dialogue from dark souls 1. I wanted to do this in 2D to improve my traditional animation skills. I also wanted to get more practice in with clip studio paint which was the program I used to animate this piece. The first step of my process was to storyboard this. I roughly based the storyboard on the interaction in which the dialogue comes from. I added a few details like the the glowing eyes in the background. I was trying to keep the dialogue in mind as I drew these up to try figure out what shot would be on screen when the dialogue played. Overall I tried to keep things as simple as possible as I knew an overly complicated piece wouldn’t fit the small section of audio I was going to be animating to.
Once this was done I drew the backgrounds properly made an animatic to get an idea of which shots would be on screen during the audio. This step was important as I needed to check if my storyboards actually fit with the dialogue as well as knowing which parts would be on screen longest and needed the most effort when it came to actually animating the character speaking. I also re drew the characters more simply with animation in mind.
Once this was done I got to work on actually animating the characters to the audio. Once again I re drew the two characters but this time I turned off pen pressure on my brush so the thickness of the lines would be consistent throughout every frame. The most time consuming part of this step was just trying to match the characters mouth to the words he was speaking. Luckily clip studio had the option to import audio on the timeline and displayed the waveform on the timeline which gave a good indicator of when words were starting and ending. I kept the mouth movements quite simple and used a reference sheet that displayed what mouth movements correspond with what letter sounds. On top of this I also used a video of myself speaking the dialogue to be extra sure that the drawings I was using for the characters mouth movements would be correct.
Below is the final piece
Evaluation
I am moderately pleased with the outcome of this piece. I think its a success overall and it does get the point across that I was imagining when I drew up my storyboards. However I also think there is quite a few things on this piece I could have done better. I am happy with how the drawings turned out and I think I did a good job with portraying the atmosphere of a dark and possibly dangerous cave. I like my choice of brush for this piece because it gives everything a more sketchy and jagged look which I am a fan of. I also think the blinking eyes in the background of the first two shots were a nice addition. My issues with the piece are more so to do with the character designs and the actual animation in the third shot.
I re drew the character multiple times as I just was not happy with how he was turning out. I do think the final design I ended up using in the final piece was the best but still not as good as I was hoping it could be. My other main issue with the piece is the animation of this character in the third shot. It ended up being not quite as expressive as I was hoping it would be. I think in future I will need to incorporate more exaggerated movements and more expressive eyes and eyebrows in animated dialogue pieces. I also did this piece in 12 frames per second as that is the framerate I usually work at in 2D. I feel like for this piece, since the movement was so limited I probably could have managed a smoother piece at a higher frame rate. However I don’t think this was the biggest issue with my piece since I do believe a more expressive piece at 12 frames a second would have worked perfectly fine.
Overall I do not think this is a bad piece however it has given me a list of things that I now know I will need to work on to improve my 2D animation skills in future.