Block out and Rough animation:

The start of my lip sync looked promising I received feedback on actions I could add in the background and some adjustments I could do to my character to sell the idea of an angry speech.

this is some of the early feedback I received:

This is the block out before I had too many keys for the lip sync:

 

Though the more I continued the more I struggled with the lip sync:

• the audio and the lips not being in sync, the mouth moving too much and too fast. It was a lot of trial and error, using a mirror and recording myself reading the lines and looking at how my own lips would move.
• I think the mistake I was doing which only made things harder for myself was instead of speaking like my audio did which the character was skipping some letters I articulated every letter in each word, which left me with too many mouth shapes in a short time frame.

I eventually got it especially when I filmed my body movement and got a glimpse of myself saying the lines and trying to speak like the character did. Pausing my work on it also helped me clear my mind to realise the mistake I did.

• For the facial expressions I used a blend of the video the audio is from and my own face, more of mine because the video the movements and expressions are quite subtle, and the lecturers recommended exaggerating.

I did a close up recording to really see how the lips should move:

I tried to act out the facial expressions to have a starting guide to what I wanted to do in 3D: this is one example.

• My second major struggle was with the switch from constant to Bezier. Now that I’ve finished I feel like I spent too much time in the constant mode and added too many in-betweens I ended up with limbs twisting around, which took me a minute to understand what was going on.

A lot of my keys were going from negative values to higher negative values that on a circular shape would be located where the positive value would be, instead of going from -1 to 0 to 1 it was more of -1 to -100.

Here is an example to make it clear:

I ended up redoing a lot of the keys to allow the Bezier mode to flow properly. In constant mode the issue didn’t appear only when I changed did it become apparent a lot of my limbs were that way.

Other than these issues it was mostly trials and error figuring out what was best for my animation, removing some movements I didn’t like or didn’t seem natural to do, and adding others.

(+) class exercise:

The 2d and 3d class exercises were very helpful, although my 3d lipsync is unfinished, it was a good start and warm up for the final animation. had I not started somewhere in the classroom I feel like I would have been lost in the assignment.

2D:

3D: