Another Lip Syncing Test

I’m really getting into this whole adding dialogue to an animation stuff. Its pretty swell. It also helps to getting use to animating to sound rather than adding sound to an animation, although I can see the need to do both in the right situations.

Well here’s the glorious animation in all its… glory. It was just a test to help animate lip syncing as the title suggests, but I thought I would spice it up towards the end:

I like how this went. Nothing extreme, just a simple announcement type idea. I think the next thing to do is to incorporate some dialogue to an animation with much more happening. Like some sort of story one could say. I already have something planned, as I mentioned in my previous lip syncing post, but still don’t feel to confidant blabbing about it just yet. Again I used the various tutorials of the previous post to help piece this together, and am now beginning to get the nag of developing the different mouth shapes myself.

All in all, this was fun, a bit lengthy and definitely a boost in confidence and into doing more stuff like this.

Demon Rubber Ninja T-Shirt

So I took my ninja faces from before and as suggested by some buds, make them into a T-shirt design. SO I decided to work on one for now and have just submitted it to Threadless:

This is the submission. If you get a chance, vote for it here. I plan on doing the others at some point, but for now here you go.

EDIT: Frustrating when your told your sumission has been accepted, only to find they have then declined it.

Self-Initiated… Initiated

An update to the animatic. It’s nearly finished, just a few bits to sort here and there.

In all honesty its at a stage were I could just start animating it from here, as you can see in parts now and then. Here is the animatic for your viewing pleasure:

So the plan for this as follows:

• Complete the animatic/begin animating characters.
• Record sounds to be used in the finished version.
• Produce backgrounds (To be done in Photoshop).
• Put it altogether…

I believe I’ve done a list like this earlier but I figured it would be a good idea to just recap on what I’m doing.

Also I decided, although it doesn’t seem to be helping much at the moment, that I would add a preloader to the animation as the animatic and especially the final cartoon is becoming/will become quite big and thus takes time to load up. So instead of leaving it as a white page, coming across as it’s just glitches or not uploaded properly.

The preloader design involved a bit of learning and I used this tutorial to help me build the preloader, as well as learning what each of the functions roles are in the script.

Speaking Through Alternate Means

What a lengthy way to say lip syncing, a feature of animating I haven’t yet tried my hands on so I thought I would. Mostly because I want to make some cartoons with dialogue but also because I wanted to try my hands at some voice acting.

Resources I used to learn how to and actually build this: The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams, Oney’s Lip Sync Timing Tutorial – Adobe Flash (Please watch his other stuff as you’ll get a better idea of this tutorial and why it says what it says), How To: Lip Sync in Flash (part 1) and (part 2) (Watch more of this guys stuff just because they’re awesome, Larry Episode 1 in particular). I also found a Voice Acting Tutorial!, which I have only watched briefly but I think is going to be monumental when it comes to making more lip synced animations.

Here is the animation in all its glory (its only about three seconds long) on my DeviantArt page and now on my YouTube page(Something I haven’t done in a while but plan to more often). This was done in a few hours and is intended only as a test. I’ll be doing more to it, adding more mouth movements for extended lettering (such as the ‘E’ at the end of Jimmy [Ji-Mee]) and other such stuff.

Okay dokay, down to the technical stuff. First things first, I put together an animatic of the whole sequence. This included the audio (which was used to measure the length of this sequence), a rough sketch of the character and a basic motion of movement, how Karl (which is the actual name of the character by the way) would walk into shot (The background is set up so that it appears as though he is walking through the doorway of the room). The black borders that you can see on the screen match up to both Adobe Flash’s default size (550 x 400) and the larger one is the actual size fo the screen I’m working by (800 x 450). As suggested i n one of the above videos, I decided to work 800 x 450 as this is the perfect size for YouTube and also uploads faster (I did this in the anticipation that I would be uploading a lot more stuff to YouTube in the future). Other then using the borders to note the edges of the workspace for when I can’t see them, it also allows me to do panning and tracking shots that would happen in the animation.

Once this was done, I put together the lip syncing. This was a two-fold job. First off I had to actually build my phonemes for Karl. These again were only rough as this was to get a quick feel to lip syncing the character. The second part to this bit was also trying to develop the timing and actually creating phonemes that accurately represented each of the pronunciations. This involved a lot of talking to myself, repeating the sentence while concentrating on the shapes my own mouth would make. Also a lot of working through the survival guide and watching the above mentioned tutorials.

 Once the draft was built, I pretty much just cleaned up all the animation, line work, phoneme transitions, movement and applying the necessary actions (i.e. the replay button). There are a couple of things that can still be done such as making transitions changes between different mouth movements, so that the mouth moves more smoothly.

As far as I’m concerned I think this went really well. considering it was a little project I decided to give a go at, it has really opened the doors to what I could potentially do in future animations. This was always one of those things that kind of restricted my animations, and if you go through all my older stuff you’ll see that no actual voice acting or lip syncing is in them.  This has really boosted my confidence as well in animating so I feel good about this. Well I’ll leave this for and get on with some more of my fiction animation, as I still have the actual sound files to create for the animation.

P.S. The character that appeared in this lip sync actually has a lot more work done then I have mentioned here, but as a personal project. I felt it safer to not mention what it is I’m doing for this one until I have more of the animation solidly built, however I will quickly mention that this peronsal animation has both character sheets and a storyboard, So at least I’ll have something for the next time this comes up.

Emily Fox

Just something I drew for a friend. She wanted to have purple somewhere in the picture:

Fox and the Apple Update

Just a simple update on the progress of the self-initiated project. Added more to the animatic. Plans for the next week are to record the sounds that will be officially used for the animation and then begin the actual animation. hopefully the animatic will be finished in the next day or two:

 

 

R.I.P Eddsworld

Just watched this youtube video.

It’s not relevant to my university work, well sort of is I guess, but I thought I would take the time to say something. I didn’t know Edd Gould personally, in fact I only watched his videos. But his videos are one of many reasons why I wanted to do animation.

It’s a shame he didn’t beat cancer, and its a hell of a reality kick-in-the-nuts. Shame he won’t be able to make any more videos and wish the best for his family and friends.

Also check out his NG page and Youtube page.