I got my final feedback. I still had too much mouth movement in a short amount of time, though it was a quick fix thankfully.

detailed block out:

This is my final animation before the feedback:

 

 

I made sure I had interesting secondary animations, like the cup and chair, other than the hair and scarf. I had fun with the cup making sure it accompanied the two smacks on the table the character did, which helped show how much strength she used when hitting the table.

• Audio was also a way to add to the existing audio of the lip-sync. They were all found online.
• The props were all made by myself.

After fixing the issues I mentioned previously it was mostly about taking time and breaks from the animation to avoid overwhelming myself and asking for feedback from friends and family so it would help me get a different perspective.

 

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:

 

References and block out sketch:

I immediately knew what audio I wanted to work on, a cut scene of Arthur Morgan from an early stage of the game red dead redemption 2, but I tried to have a look at other things I could do, but I was happy with that initial audio I chose. My references mainly consisted of looking at the reference sheet for the letters and their mouth shapes, the animation the audio is from and mostly my own video of myself acting out what I wanted my character to do in theory, but I made a few changes accordingly to how I naturally would have behaved in an angry scenario my character was supposedly in.

This is a screenshot of the video I filmed of myself acting out the characters action.

This is the video my audio is from:

I picked out the 8 seconds I wanted to work on, I then planned the actions roughly, I added some details like the hand movements I wanted the character to do or if there were pointing or had their hand in a fist. From that point I took advice from the class exercises we did and wrote down the audio so I could see where all my vowels were and the letter of the word where pressure was put on for example the word friends in the first sentence.

I did struggle with the lip sync, though the class exercise with the rain rig was a good warm up to the upcoming animation I planned for myself.