For my 11 second animation, I have chosen to make a 3D video. I intend to use this animation in my showreel – researching the showreels of professional 3D animators on YouTube helped me to decide on what style I want for my animation. I would like to create a video that will aim my showreel towards animation studios around Belfast, such as Jam Media, Flickerpix and Sixteen South, which create 3D animated content.
Flickerpix
Jam Media
Although my animation wouldn’t appeal to young children, I want to present an interest in 3D animation to potential employers. In the future I will spend more time thinking of ideas for animations that align with their content.
TikTok and Instagram Reels were helpful to find video references for the 11 second animation as these platforms encourage short video content. I found an edited sound on a TikTok video which had dialog from ‘Kill Bill: Vol 2’ and searched for the song on YouTube and legally downloaded it, as well as the corresponding scene from Kill Bill.
This scene was great to use for animating a mouth, however the rest of her face is very expressionless which meant I had to really exaggerate small movements when animating.
I wanted to animate Azri swinging her scythe after speaking, and I came across a clip on Instagram that worked well as a reference. The sound of her stick moving through the air would have been useful to animate with, though the quality could have been better.
I used Premiere Pro to edit these together to get a reference video (mp4) and sound (wav) for my animation. I took the sound into Maya which helped when I was timing the key poses and watched the video while animating the lip sync.
WAV:
MP4:
In the future, I will work harder on my time management skills as I realised I wouldn’t have time to animate Azri wielding her scythe. To compromise, I found a free motorbike model on TurboSquid (website) and an audio reference of a motorbike sound on YouTube which I edited using Premiere Pro. Overall, I’m happy with this sound although I could add some non-essential sounds to hint that a motorbike is present in the beginning of the clip.
Searching for a video of a person riding a motorbike on YouTube to use as a reference proved difficult as they were mostly aesthetic short-films for the motorbiking community. I attempted making my own reference to look at while animating a hand movement on the handle of the bike. In the future, I could try looking for 2D animated loops of bikers as I imagine there would be examples with more exaggerated movement as opposed to a stationary sitting position seen in real life.
I began animating by importing the sound and blocking the lip sync using Alec’s Studio Library mouth shapes, key-framing the vowels alongside the audio. At times it was challenging to figure out which mouth shape to use on which frame, especially the ‘oo’ and ‘uh’ shapes where the corners of the mouth were very close and I had to decide weather or not the teeth should show, but the reference video is very clear and that made the task easier to accomplish. Once I was happy with the mouth blocking, I added inbetweens to curve the lip up and show aggression. I tried improving this motion by overlapping the lip animation with the previous mouth shape key frame. Animating Azri’s head movement added attitude. In the reference, she moves her head to emphasize her words, so I blocked in the frames to shake Azri’s head according to the timing of the word key frames. In the future I will roll her neck more to the left to make it less rigid. At the beginning of the animation, before the speaking begins, Azri’s eyes didn’t have enough movement which was jarring to watch. I added in an extra blink and rolled the eyes towards the camera to make the video more engaging. Once I animated one blink I copied and pasted the keys in the graph editor to where I needed them. The blinks looked unnaturally similar – I changed the curve heights to add variation in timing. Azri’s eyebrows had the same problem – I delayed moving one eyebrow up or down to make it look more natural. The arms and hands caused the most problems when animating as I had animated the hands and then later I curved the spine controls. Counter-animating changes so the hands and fingers stayed on the handle caused multiple jumps, so I spent most of my time in the graph editor correcting curves and deleting keys until the arms moved smoothly. If I were to do this task again I would find better references for a forward-leaning motion so I could block out the movement at the beginning of the animation process. The hair could have more movement around her face by using secondary-animation in the direction of her head. The Azri rig has limited controls for the face, so to overcome the lack of movement around the nose, I used the lower eyelid controls to lift the face and squint her eyes, which added personality to the character.
I showed this to a friend who told me that the mouth shapes were noticeably square, so I opened up the reference video and went back to move the corner mouth controls throughout the dialogue and made the lip-sync more natural. I closed the mouth on the word ‘Destination’, and moved the lips around to show her teeth more at some points. I zoomed into the face and played with the camera settings and lighting to improve the presentation.
My final animation has a few inconsistencies that I would like to change in the future – she is beginning to ride a motorbike, yet Azri and the bike have no side-to-side swaying or hair/body movement to communicate to the viewer that this is happening. I would also like to animate her clothes blowing in the wind and pay more attention to the bike by having it skid around before taking off. Her body is very stationary – I could curve the spine more dramatically by key framing more exaggerated poses before animating the arms and hands. This animation goes on for 14 seconds which exceeds the time limit, however overall I am happy with my video as I feel I have communicated personality and expression through animating a 3D character.