For this assignment, I was practising an area of animation in which I have never had any experience in prior. The use of facial features and expressions matching with an actors voice.
I used a sound clip called “Pink or Green?” from “The 11 Second Club”. The website link to this clip is below;
https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/december14/winner
Before starting this assignment, I chose to use the Azri rig, which we were provided previously in the academic year. I had to chose some sort of inspiration from a studio or animated film or show in order to gauge the style of animation that I wanted to give the character in my short 8-11 second clip. Most of the inspiration however is used for the facial movements or expressions. Due to the Azri rig’s large eyes and small structure, I decided to take inspiration from the facial expressions of some of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ most famous characters. Anna and Elsa, from Frozen. A clip I used for reference on multiple occasions is from Frozen II is as follows;
I believe I showed the correlation between this referenced clip and the facial expressions used for my character quite effectively. Using the eyebrows, eyes and over exaggerated movements in the corners of the mouth to my advantage.
I also used pictures of my own mouth and eyebrows, taken on my phone, to give me a real life reference and to get a better sense of what positions anticipate certain sounds in the mouth.
This assignment has been extremely helpful to me and my skills as an Animator. Using the audio as a challenge to sync movements to verbal actions has been amazing practice for any future industry experience in character Animation. However, there were a few things that I found difficult in the Animation process for this character. When I began animating, I chose to do the mouth, eye, eyebrow, tongue and chin movements before all other parts of the character. This proved difficult to animate the rest of the body parts as I key framed all of the controls in at once each time i changed the facial expressions. Meaning that when I went on to animate the rest of the character, the parts had key framed in a single position for the entire length of the audio. I had to go through each control, that wasn’t the facial features of the character, and delete the key frames i had placed throughout the animations length before being able to start animating the body. This caused a lot of wasted time and perhaps not as good of an outcome for the final animation.
Apart from this, my experience with this assignment has been good, I have learnt from my mistakes and now know the right way to begin the work process for audio synced animations. I will go back to this blog post in future projects for help and reference on how to create the best synced animation that I can. The Portfolio showing the final clips of this animation from different angles is linked in my submission.