For my lip sync animation, I chose an 11 second audio clip from one of my favourite shows, Nathan For You.
I started off by doing some researching and gathering references. I used pinterest to gather reference photos for some key poses I had in mind. I also found this lip sync reference on Pinterest, which I found very useful when drawing mouth shapes.
I also referenced the below youtube video when working on this project. The diagrams used in this video were really clear and helpful and I referenced them a lot when working on my lip sync. The person in the video also breaks down different sounds and why the mouth position would be as such for each sound really clearly and concisely.
I recorded some videos of myself speaking and mimicking poses which I could refer to while animating also, and I found it very helpful to act out the poses myself. Not just as a visual reference, but for getting a feel for the pose and where body weight would be shifted etc.
When considering my style of animation, I mostly referenced hand-drawn animation studios and artists such as Studio Meala, Chelsea Ortega, and thatskidding. I used a textured brush for my line art. For the style of my characters, I used a slightly more simplistic and less detailed version of my usual art style.
When choosing characters to animate, I chose characters whos expressions and dynamic would suit the audio clip. My female character (Mion) has a cocky personality and teases the other character (Keiichi) a lot, and knowing their personalities and dynamic helped when deciding on their facial expressions. Mion’s posture
When starting my animation, I first synced some rough key poses to the audio.
My next step was to draw a more detailed outline of the figure, as well as some facial expressions. At this stage I added some in between frames for when the character turns, some head tilts, and various other little movements like her finger wagging and when she moves her arms from her face at the end of the animation. I also wrote words on the frames as the character was saying them to help me when I was drawing the mouth positions.
Next, I added roughs for the hair and clothes on seperate layers.
The final stage of my process was doing cleaner linework. This part of the process was quite time consuming as I found myself being too much of a perfectionist at some stages. I had to learn to accept small imperfections on frames that would only be visible for a split second.
I debated whether to colour my animation or not, but in the end decided against it as colouring hand drawn animation is something we have not yet been taught in class and it’s a very time consuming progress. Colouring animation is something I’d like to practice more given the time.
Reflecting on my animation, one thing I would do different is the scaling. After finishing my animation and looking back on it, I notice my character’s scaling is slightly off. To help with this, I copy pasted the generic circle shape for the head when doing the rough animation, trying to keep the size consistent. But upon actually lining the animation, my scaling was thrown off. To counter this in future, I will probably put more time into the roughs for the animation, and have them much cleaner before moving onto lining. I might do one final rough draft, combining roughs for clothes and hair, before moving onto the lining stage.
As well as this, I would probably add more movements to things like hair, clothing, etc. When looking back on my animation, I feel that I could have had more secondary movement on things like her tie, hair, and skirt. I would also add some more in between frames, as well as some smear frames for movement. I would have to look up some videos and tutorials on smear frames, as they’re something I don’t have experience working with and haven’t learned much about.
I would also make use of keyframes more in future to make smoother animations. I was focused on hand drawing everything and feel like my animation ended up being not very smooth – certain movements, like hair moving and when Mion’s finger is wagging, or eyes moving, could have used keyframes for a smoother look.
I found the 2D animation course we did with NI screen to be my biggest help during this exercise. We had a short workshop on lip syncing which I took notes at and the information I received at that workshop was most helpful to me during this exercise. One trick we learned during that workshop was, after finishing the animation, to move the audio track backwards by 3 frames. This trick makes the audio sync up much better with the animation.