After 5 weeks, I finally produced this clip. I have uploaded the living voice posts 1-6 which shows my workflow step by step. This post will be talking about essential elements from all 6 posts before. That means no chit chat, no complaining and no useless information.
I chosed the clip 04, it is about a little girl talking about being a millionaire. Normally I`d design a little girl that seems to be able to create that soft sweet sound like the one down below:
However, at some point my brain suddenly broke and started to think if my character is full-grown lady with alcohol in her hands. Will this monologue be more interesting than hearing it from a normal girl?
That was what I did eventually. I designed a bar lady with a short dress and a pair of high heels. I kept her cloth to be simple and erased tiny details like necklaces you can see from the sketch below. I did this to make sure I can have a easier life when doing my inbetweens.
I normally don`t draw people`s hair like this. The idea came from the disney gif the calss lecture used in its ppt. There was a little mermaid one about an excellent head turn and movement of her hair. I was lookinhg at it and thinking that design could be both efficient and beautiful if I want to do hair movements. Hence the design below
Why did I cover her eyes? It`s a lip-sync project and the second most important thing in this project shall be her eyes!! Why did I do that?
The idea was disguise. I was hoping that in my animation my character will keep making body languages and try to distract a considerable amout of eye sight from her lip and face to her body. Because that is exactly what people like her would do in real life! They keep moving so you can`t tell if they are telling the truth or not. It does work.
Under the idea of that I made this.
Instead of full attention on her face, I add a lot of close-up shots of her body parts and only three of them shows a complete facial expression. Is this appropiate? I mean it is afterall a lip-sync project. We need to practise our skills on doing facial expressions, right? That is the point I started to smell something wrong that would turn to be a great deal later. But I ignored it anyway because I AM A FOOL.
But I did thought about the problem it may cause when I have too many cuts. They video need to be 15 seconds long. Too much changes would make my viewer feel dizzy and hard to tell what`s going on out there. So I deleted some of the close-up shots and made the third one with 7 cuts.
The background didn`t cost much time so the quality is not that great. there is a comfy chair, a bottle of wine on a table, a desk full of strange devices and a weird oven on the left.
I actually did some design ont those gadgets on the desk. I was hoping that I would have time to animate them all.
Like the biggest one with a jar of wine, that is actually a machine that goes up and down to stimulate the movement bartenders do to mix up drinks with their speical cups.
I did a terrible job on X-sheet. That is because I kept thinking about the language itself instead of the pronounciation.. I made the sheet out of how the word is made based on ancient english rules instead of how they are sounded. That is one big flaw. My character design is a failure, either. All my lip movement looks exactly the same. Giving me less chance to create differences between frames. Both of those two flaws were kept instead of fixed becasue I AM A FOOL and I don`t have time. And both of them became the reason why my outcome looks so miserable.
I aslo did two moodboard. One about character design and one about background.
You can see some similiar color choices up there.
And then it`s drawing key frames and inbetweens. Massive amount of time were invested and littie returned. Massive Confidence is lost and finally some clip showed up. They look just like sadness. I combined pose to pose and straight ahead together as sometimes straight ahead works better with my simple tiny brain.
You can see my lines keeps warping and moving in a disgusting way. It appears that I can`t even draw straight lines. Lack of understanding of human anatomy and lack of clean-ups casues this problem and I feel deeply shameful for what I did up there. That is just unacceptable.
But Nothing seems to be a big deal if you take a good look on my lip-sync. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?! I smashed my face when I exported my clip. Nothing is synchronizing and nothing looks nature. And my storyboard is making everything looks even worse. I have little shots on mouth and all of them is horrible. My plan of distracting attention away from the mouth backfires on me just as I worried. As this plan only works when I got a solid, perfect lip-sync animation.
Some problems, with the help from Jess and Hannah, was solved. For instance, I was trying to draw a movement that the lady uses her arm to hold the body and adjust her sitting pose. The action ends quickly and it should cost few frames. It turned out that I really am a fool to believe that I could do right judgement. Under Hannah`s wise suggestion I edited the audio to make a longer pause and I also spent some time reducing the background noise. Longer pauses gave me more time doing the movements and adding anticipations into the movement to make everything looks better. The outcome is better.
But still I need to do a lot of re-draw and clean ups. And here comes the last disaster. Data lost.
It`s too old-school that all of you will think this is just a stupid excuse for my lazyness. But it did happen. So if you don`t want to believe me, I understand that but please keep reading.
In the last week, only three days away from deadline. My tablet suddenly cannot work. It is the only tool I have to draw animation. So I reset my whole laptop but I forgot to backup my data. So, Everything was lost except some sequenced images I exported to run some tests on. That was the lifeline to me. I quickly imported them and make a new animation out of them. With the same warping lines and disgusting lip-syncs. I did my best to correct them all but my time didn`t allow it. I still had coloring and editing to do at that time.
I jumped to coloring and I did what I could to enhance the view. But the result still looks disappointing. I finished something that is not good enought as a normal animation, and far worse as a lip-sync project.
Anything l learned from these five weeks is that animation is based on multiple pre-productions. Doing them right makes doing animation right possible. My biggest failure may be that I underestimated the importance of pre-production. It is a precious experience but still some one smarter than me could figure this one out easily at the start of this project.
And I need to back up my files.
That should be all I want to talk about. Thank you for reading till the very end. If you want to know more about this project, I have 6 posts about a more complete step by step of this one on myblog. Please take a look.