—Research—
When starting this project I wanted to create a 2D animation but due to time restraints and other responsibilities I chose to create a 3D animation instead.
I looked into different studios that did a range of different animation styles like 2D or 3D and found Flickerpix Animation Studios. Their work is intended for a variety of ages and reaches international audiences.
To begin, I created rough storyboards of what I wanted the animation to look like, then I looked up some references to base the movement off of.
—Animation—
I set the scene with the Azri rig as a reference and created some furniture as set dressing; this included a mug, a spoon and a table. Next, I blocked out the basic motion of the animation to the audio lines to get a rough idea of pacing and timing and then refined the motion.
After, I animated the mouth movements using Alec’s videos on Blackboard as reference and this Youtube video to help further understand lip sync in animation.
Sound – Better late than early (Animation Tip) – YouTube
At first I found it difficult to make the right mouth movements and would often make the movements too extreme and appear too early so it didn’t look like the right words were being spoken. After a bit of trial and error and research on Youtube and rewatching some tutorial videos on Blackboard , I got a hang of creating the mouth movements and the timing.
Finally, I added in the movement of the tongue and tweaked the animation to smooth it out and adjust the position of things a bit. I added in a camera and lights and created a playblast to ensure I was happy with it before rendering out the final animation using Maya.
Overall, I am happy with the outcome of this project and enjoyed working with the Azri rig. I’m new to lip sync animation so I found the tutorials on Blackboard and Youtube invaluable as I got used to the controls for Azri’s face. If I had more time I would have liked to make the camera movements more interesting or expressive but I like that the lip sync is able to be the main focus with the simple camera movements.