Made using Toon Boom Harmony

Lip Sync Animation- Yun Jou

Gif Version

Long Jump Animation- Raffina

Weight lift Animation

After my Halloween break, I was pretty fatigued after doing the animated walk cycles for the previous submission, and it took a while to get started on the three animated submissions for the Christmas deadline. I selected 2 characters from different franchises this time to do my animated submissions, Raffina and Yun Jou, and made the weight lift animation with a simple designed original character to speed up animation.

I have learned a lot about animating character doing other things from Walking and running, and it was interesting to learn how the body moves, especially from my references, as it did actions suck as jumping or lifting heavy objects.

I filmed myself doing a long jump, and weight lifting, and even did a lip sync test for each of my animated submissions, and while the long jump and weight lifting were useful in helping me create my animated pieces the lip sync one was largely done without the need of the reference. Then I put all of the refs into Toon Boom Harmony and drew key frames as I animated.

 

The lip sync test was done using Yun Jou, one of the Earthen Heart disciples from LIVE A LIVE, who is a highly skilled martial artist and prodigious young boy with a kind heart, described as having a purity of spirit that shines through in every word and deed he does. I had chosen him because I was very familiar with the character and had been fixating on specifically the Imperial China Chapter of the game for a while now. I used his dialogue in his speech to Oersted for the lip sync test.

When I sent the initial completed animation to Alec he told me that the animation was only 3 seconds, too short for the actual brief.

So I extended the animation to include more of Yun Jou’s Dialogue, adding in him lifting his head before he says “When we struggle” and shaking his head as he says “When we’re lost and don’t know what to do” as well as adding more movement to his eyes and eyebrows as he is talking throughout the animation. I also added some secondary animation to the ribbon of his bandana and his hair, and took great care to make sure that his lip flaps matched up to his dialogue, even animating in 1s at certain points. My final animation was 11 seconds long, and while it didn’t use all of the audio above, I consider it to be the best of the three animations I had made, being especially proud of how I made Yun change his expressions as he talked, and how I animated his lip flaps to his dialogue. I also learned about how the body moves up with the head when the head is tilted up, so I animated the body moving with the head as it tilted up.

The character I selected for the long Jump is Raffina, from Puyo Puyo like Ecolo from my previous semester. Raffina is a very outgoing and snobbish character, very good at martial arts like Yun Jou but hardly magically proficient. I chose her due to my ongoing obsession with Puyo Puyo characters, and much like Ecolo I had drawn her in personal illustrations before.

The same was said for Yun Jou. It was quite fun animating Raffina following my reference to the long jump, as I added a lot of different anticipations to the animations, such as her first lifting her arms up before putting them out behind her back as she crouches down, and also added secondary animation and follow through such as he hair unfurling as she jumps and her clothes still moving after she had finished the jump, and her closing her eyes at the start of the jump.

When I received feedback from my teachers, they told me to make the long jump last a little bit longer, adding an extra frame of animation to it so that my character was in the air longer. I was worried about adding in the extra frames into the animation, as that would have meant making more line art for the final piece, but I added it in and it made the jump easier to focus. I simplified Raffina’s design and omitted her bag due to time constraints, as I finished Raffina’s animation very late into the semester, and didn’t want to deal with the hassle of adding her finer details, such as the stripes on her tights.

I am quite proud of my long jump animation, as a previous long jump animation I did as a test in this semester had a lot of problems, such as the arms being far too long compared to the waist. The arms should only reach no further than above the knee. the jump itself was also a bit janky, but the final animation I did for submission is proof of how well I’ve improved between that and the initial warm up. Below is a comparison between the test and the final submission.

The final animation was a weight lifting animation. I initially wanted Yun Jou to be the character doing the weight lift, but due to having very little time left by the time I had really started, I decided to make the character a simple designed generic boy wearing a hoodie. When I got my feedback on the weight lift, I was told to make the hands slightly overlap by having one of them grip the weights later than the other. As I worked on the animation, I added some follow through and secondary animation to the character’s hair and added expressions to his face to convey him straining as he struggled to keep the weights up in the air, and added his head drag behind his body as he lifted himself back up. I also added anticipation to his body leaning back before moving forward and he lowers the weights. I do wish I had worked more on the animation, but due to time constraints I had to cut corners, though I didn’t cut back on animation.

Like the Long Jump animation, I worked on a warm up animation to help me get familiar with how the body works. While the timing and object being lifted, a large weight rather than two smaller ones held in each hand, are different, much of the fundamental parts of the body moving are the same, such as the person bending down to pick up the weights, and them trying to lift it.

For all these characters I created little sketches of their proportions to aid me in the creation of the animations, using what I learned about how the arms should reach no further than the top of the thighs from a book by Ryu Sumiyoshi called “A guide to Drawing Manga Furries” which had a section on learning about the basic human body, and that failing to understand it could create characters with bizzare proportions.

I had a lot of fun doing the animations, even if I did get distracted from the work to focus on the 3D work which also held me back from doing the 2D work, but the teachers were helpful in how to make my animations more lively and less robotic. Converting the live action references was also an absolute pain, as the I made each of the key frames last for seconds at a time trying to create all of them. This made Toon Boom Harmony lag horribly and made me question my own sanity trying to shorten them down to just 2s. Nonetheless, I enjoyed making the animations and I learned a great deal about how the human body moves as it does actions like weight lifting and long jumping, and I hope to take these on board the next time I have the opportunity to animate actions like these. A lot of animators use reference to aid their animation, and help them understand how the human body bends and moves.

I also learned a great deal about how the mouth can produce different sounds when it is contorted into different shapes. For example, when it is wide open, it produces an “aaah” sound. and when it is small and round, it can make an ooooh sound. The tongue can help produce “L” sounds, and teeth can help to make a wide range of sounds, such as “Nnn”, “T” and “D” sounds. Mouth sheets are incredibly useful to help you animate someone talking, and if you know the mouth shapes, you can really bring the dialogue to life in your animation.

Overall, I’ve learned a lot about the anatomy of humans as well as how the body moves as it does certain actions such as weight lifting and long jumping, as well as animating them, as they’re both actions I haven’t really done a dedicated animation to either those actions before, though I had done an animation of Sig from Puyo puyo lifting up a ball and throwing it back in 2021. I feel between back then and now I have really improved in the timing and anticipation of my animations. I hop the next semester will allow me to animate even more different actions and help me to think about my final year project.