Term 2: Week 1 – Body Acting, Two Characters, Lip Syncing and Redesigns
2022 is off to a flying start! This week was spent looking at the body acting exercise that was completed over the holidays, as well as being a little proactive and looking ahead to the next couple of weeks.
In the time since my last post, I updated the animation to include a background, lighting effects and a carriage to open up the animation. During last term’s assessment, Shaun mentioned the idea of narrative a lot, so I thought a bit more about the setting and location this exercise might take place in, and hope the background provides a little bit of context.
Changes I’ve made specifically following feedback from Steve is the wire has now changed to a hook. Steve sketched out a bunch of hooks on paper to try and work out the arc that one might throw the hook, and let it latch onto the suitcase. I think it’s much more obvious what’s going on compared to the thin wire and was a worthy change. Other minor changes include some extra frames of anticipation and overshoot when the character turns, and letting the arm loosely swing when he turns back in horror at the suitcase.
Before I talk about the next exercise, I should probably provide some context to the characters chosen. Over the holidays, as a way of just updating pre-MA work and seeing what I’d learnt over the last term, I revisited 4 characters I’d designed in January 2020 for my animated adaptation of Maurice Leblanc’s Lupin story.
The original designs were minimalistic, not very well proportioned and felt very outdated with my current style. As such, I gave them all a redesign, not just the colours but in some cases, an overhaul on their actual clothes. I took great care in choosing slightly desaturated, but more mature-looking colours, and wanted to capture their personalities in their front-facing walk pose. Ganimard’s more focused and direct, Nelly is on an adventure, Jerland treasures her precious jewels, and Lupin is relaxed. Those were the vibes I got when adapting the story, and it was nice to put some of the lessons I learnt from Bianca Ansem into practice.
With these designs in place, I started to implement them into my actual exercises, starting with the two character exercise that Steve had sent notes on prior. We needed to animate two characters interacting in some form, whether standing in a queue or listening to music was our choice. I chose music so I had an excuse to include one of my favourite composers, Yuki Hayashi, into the animation. The other reason I chose music was because I could animate a character bopping in the same way I do when listening to music, which I thought would ease up the process of working out the movement.
Anyone who had watched my original Lupin animation might find a few references in here: the camera hiding the jewels in the front, the suitcases that were stolen from all over, the sky and the boat that Lupin and the cast travelled on amongst other things were all to provide context and narrative that I’ve been leaning into since assessment. I got feedback from Stephanie saying it was nice and fluid and the timing was great, but to consider changing the video on screen – flashing words can attract attention when it isn’t necessary so I’ll be sure to fix it up in the next couple of days.
Lastly, and probably the most enjoyable exercise of the week, was the lip syncing exercise. Now I must admit, Steve hasn’t introduced this exercise properly yet, but because the notes were on Moodle and because we were recording our audio, I felt like giving it a shot anyways. We were introduced to the sound studio, which gave us some high quality recordings with the microphone. I knew what I wanted as part of my lip syncing exercise, which was to read off a quote from one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes “Vincent and the Doctor”.
When Steve briefly discussed this exercise, he mentioned to take a “less is more” approach, keeping it much simpler than what we might expect. As such, the character movement is limited, with a focus on art and mouth expressions. The notes provided on moodle showed various mouth expressions with various syllables, so I studied those and used them on the appropriate syllables. I also got one of my peers, Sophie, to record me whilst I did a take on the quote as reference to how my mouth moved which helped a lot in the end.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t done lip syncing before, so I used my usual approach of drawing 3 or 4 different mouth shapes and cycling through them to provide variety in the movement. For me, the most important part of animating a mouth is moving the jawline, which helps to make the animation feel more natural and real. You can see these qualities in shows like Boruto, where the mouth feels alive and real thanks to a cycle of multiple shapes, so I wanted to capture that feeling. I watched the episode back, added one or two characters from the show and an approximation of one of the paintings featured in the show to add context to the scene. All in all, very pleased with the lip sync.
One last thing to note were changes to two animations I made over the holidays. The first is to the mood-change walk cycle. In line with my body acting exercise, I added some gradients to provide a sense of depth, but also included some previous animations I made that I wouldn’t be submitting as part of my final outcomes to help make the scene feel just a little busier.
In the case of the 2D push, I completely redid the 2D push after the Lupin redesigns, mainly because I felt the proportions of the character felt wrong. The head felt too large compared to the rest of the body, and I wanted to start lining some of my characters up across multiple animations.
Again, like my previous updates on other exercises, objects were added into the foreground and blurred to help provide a sense of depth, lighting was taken into account and the room just helps to provide some context as to where the character might be, in this case a warehouse.
And that wraps up the holidays and the opening week to this new term. Next week will be the official start of the two character exercise, so I’ll likely update the exercise according to Steve’s feedback.