Research
For my personal development, one of the prompts was to use audio of our choice to help create an emotive performance with animation. I instantly realized that the application ‘Tik Tok’ was a perfect place to search for audios, as it is a very popular place to use monologues with music. I had many audios saved already so all I had to do was choose my favorite one. This led me to choose a line from Evellyn, from League of Legends, with dark music in the background.
This set a vibe that guided me to which direction emotively I was going to work with, dark, sassy, seductive, and evil. Overall I’m going for more realistic movements with my animation but exaggerating some parts for extra expression. This is the type of stuff I’ve noticed and admired in Overwatch animations from Blizzard. Aswell as the animators working with Riot Games, creating music videos and cinematics.
I’ve considered using several different rigs but they either didn’t fit the vibe or had issues with them. In the end, I chose the Azri rig.
This is a Tik Tok with that audio of me performing to give me a reference for the animation. After several takes, I chose this one. I kept confident, slow-ish, smooth movements with a touch of suddenness for the sassy effect of my character.
Progress
From a previous project, I imported a chair for her to interact with. I went with a pose to pose approach with this animation, creating the key poses for the movements and then continuing by smoothing them out with inbetweens. I added the audio to the animation to help me with the timing and lip syncing.
At the beginning of the animation before I changed it to the other movement.
Slightly smoother but still needs more work.
Blockout of the last part.
Feedback
Gathering feedback I’ve been advised to make her less jerky and smoother by easing in and out and adding momentum to her movements and add some head movements.
After I felt confident with the main movement, I detoured to add a camera and positioned it how I wanted for the animation.
After I added the lipsynch, I decided to work on the hair movement, which I did not consider at first as I planned to do it in Unreal Engine with cloth physics. I am glad I didn’t do this and hand-animated it.
Tools and Scene
For my aid with the lip-syncing animation, I installed the Studio Library add-on. With this, I could save the facial poses and use them for all the parts of the animation without having to reshape every expression with an already moving body, making it extra difficult. I created the sounds of the mouth with reference to looking at myself in the mirror, and I saved them all to use in the animation.
I heavily relied on the dope sheet and graph editor to offset the movements to smooth out any kinks and overall help with the flow of the whole performance.
For the scene, I wanted an ominous void with a spotlight on the subject. I inserted a black image plane for the endless void and added a floor for the character to interact with. I have a directional light for a wash of color over the character and chair, with a red spotlight shining at her for a spooky effect and then an intense blue spotlight from the back for shadows and dimension on the character.
Overall
I am extremely happy with how she turned out. It perfectly captures the essence I wanted and think she emotes naturally without feeling robotic. There are several things I would fix if I had more time but overall I’m very proud of this animation.