Study Task 2: Talk This Way

We were taught how to lip sync by making a phoenome mouth chart and planning the placement of the keyframes through use of a dope sheet before using After Effects to actually do it.

The dope sheet planning

My phoenome 'cheat sheet'

This was the resulting animation (I used my Captain Flintlock character from last year!):

What I learned:

• Certain mouth positions can be shared for multiple sounds
• How to lip sync by using time mapping in After Effects
• Using a dope sheet works well to give a general idea of where to put the keyframes but I personally needed to edit the positioning of the keyframes quite a bit in After Effects

What worked well:

• Using time remapping in After Effects made lip syncing much easier than traditionally drawing it frame by frame
• Offsetting the frames one or two frames before the start of the sound

What could be improved:

• I could have planned out the keyframes on the dope sheet a bit better
• I feel that an extra tween phoenome might have made parts of the lip syncing smoother
• Only lips were required for this task but as I added a background, I will keep in mind that for future reference I might need to move other parts of the face like the cheeks and chin to make the lip movement look more natural.

Study Task 2 - Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose

Film 1 - Straight Ahead - Plasticine

This was my first attempt at a stop motion animation (if you didn't count the pixilation which was arguably very similar) and I ended up with a few notable learning points. Similarly to pixilation for the most part, there were very little chances to redo a frame without redoing the whole scene because it was difficult to remold the plasticine to the exact shape it was before the frame change, as seems to be the case with straight ahead animation in general. 

Also for no particular reason, I made my model anthropomorphic instead of human by adding large ears. At the time I didn't think it would have much of an effect, but during filming it actually benefitted in conveying my character's curiosity.

One thing that bothered me about my animation which I didn't realise until much later was that the lighting was not constant due to my shadow inadvertently making an appearance in the odd frame here and there. For future reference I now know to be wary of my position when I'm taking the photos. I would also add a better background as that bothered me too.

Don't Text and Drive

Film 2 - Pose to Pose - Paper cut out

Pose to pose generally seems easier to deal with as it comes with a certain degree of leniency when it comes to redoing frames. However, I had a harder time with this film than with the plasticine, purely due to technical issues when it came to transferring the images into the video software (ultimately I had to downgrade the size and quality of the images just so I could work with them).

I did like how this turned out however (I ended up changing my original idea and adding a bit of pixilation for comedic value) and it was fun to see it all come together in the end.

First Flight