Term 2: Week 4 – Lip Sync

Week 4 was all about lip syncing, something I’ve had experience prior (and which I posted my original lip sync hand in at the start of the term) but taking a less “static” approach than what I’ve done prior to this course.

For this lip sync exercise, we’re due to submit two different lip syncs: one set by Steve and one of our own choosing. Steve gave us a selection of films, only one of which I knew of, hence I chose Star Wars, a line by Carrie Fisher. Like facial acting, body acting felt like it led the lip sync, with each phrase linked to the body acting. I looked at the original scene, but given that the camera is off Fisher for much of it, I decided not to follow the original’s acting and lead with a pointing hand.

Like the Doctor Who animation before it, I settled on Ichiro Uno’s art style, with sharpish eyes, relatively sharp nose shading and line work that felt more grounded in reality. It does the job of breaking the phrases down, and follows the mouth shapes as best as I could so I’m pleased with how this animation has turned out.

Steve mentioned for the lip sync of our choice that we could choose audio from any existing show (though avoid animated works because it’ll be constantly compared to). As a result, I switched out my own recorded audio and replaced it with the original scene for the Doctor Who lip sync.

To my surprise, there was a fair number of changes that needed to be made, mainly because I misread the quote in my recording, but also because the original actor, Matt Smith, gave an entirely different delivery to the line that, whilst better matching the facial expressions I drew, were set to a completely different timing. The original scene also involved a hug, which I haven’t animated, and the timing in general had more pauses which the audio I recorded didn’t accommodate for.

Whilst the art was left completely alone (I felt the Ichiro Uno style worked perfectly well prior), I added some extra frames in the middle to avoid the “anime static” look of a character’s mouth being the only form of movement, which I think helps avoid an awkward pause when the character discusses about bad things not being able to be wiped away.

Ultimately, I do prefer having the original audio in, and this would be what I submitted if I didn’t join a group project.

An idea started by my classmate Marco, a group of us (seven or eight) recorded our own lines as if we were a group of criminals in a rollcall. They didn’t need to be real (I’d be concerned if they were), nor did they need to be serious. We had characters swapping toes, releasing guinea pigs, skeleton robbing etc., and of course, mine is the most serious: trying to sneak into an orchestra playing the triangle (no offence to triangle players of course).

I settled on Yasuo Ōtsuka’s style given my recent interest in breaking down that art style, plus as a simpler artstyle, it gave me a bit more freedom in getting the character to move more. As someone who is typically reserved in the number of frames drawn for lip sync, I wanted it to move more than any prior lip sync I’ve done, which I think is reflected in comparison to my previous attempts above. I kept the shading soft as to avoid losing the looseness of Ōtsuka’s style, and gave a more expressive face with a square chin. I have yet to see what everyone else’s lip syncs will look like, but I’m very pleased with how Jimbob McGee has turned out.

That’s all from the lip sync exercise for now, but I’d like to cover some clean-up practice I’ve done outside of the exercises.

This week, we had Bianca Ansems return for a lesson on storyboarding, what makes effective compositions and how we should frame characters.

At the end, we were given an exercise to create a storyboard that emphasised a plot twist regarding where one of the characters were. As such, I went in with the idea of framing the characters on opposite sides, often using the rule of thirds that Bianca mentioned, and giving hints of the library plot twist early. Bianca’s feedback was positive, noting however that I could have kept the library twist a little earlier, potentially centring the phone since there isn’t a need for the rule of third at that point, and better framing the character in the storyboard at the end to make them more visible in the library. This is an exercise I want to return to later as a finished animation, even if it’s not to be marked.

Like last week, I also had another go at cleaning up one of my classmate’s work, this time Neale with his simplistic character design. Again, because it was incomplete, I had a go at retiming the second half of the walk cycle and volume control with the hat. You can see the result below, which I think worked out pretty well.

Lastly, and probably my favourite animation out of the batch, is this short animation I made using Naohiro Shintani’s character designs from Dragon Ball Super: Broly.

The animation was largely made so I could practice follow through with the hair, something I’ve not been doing in recent exercises. I rewatched said film a few times to draw inspiration for how Goku moves, how the hair moves and how things like clothes and shading were handled in that film.

After the rough version, I found I wasn’t too happy with the transition from the base black hair to the transformed red hair, and redrew the middle frames so the spiking hair could be noticed by the audience. Among other corrections involved the face, where the eyes, nose and mouth were spaced a little too far apart in places. Whilst this isn’t an animation that I’ll be submitting in the future, I’m very happy I spent time making this, and it was also interesting to lip sync another language.

That’s all for this week, next week will be the start of working with the second years.