For the last two exercises of the term, we were told to create 2 short lip sync animations- one with a sound recorded by us and another one from the list Steve gave us.
I chose to do Steve’s ‘He’s left me now’ audio alongside Steve and some of my class mates. For this, I began by studying my bit of the audio and testing out the li sync animation.
On TV Paint, I wrote the bit of the audio I was animating and divided it by its essential syllables. For example, the word ‘that’ would be mouthed as ‘the’ considering Steve’s accent+ the way he extends the ‘a’ when he sings it leaves it with no need for a ‘t’ at the end of ‘that’.
Following this logic, I began drawing mouth shapes for each individual letter.
I then put it all together to see how it would look like.
After some feedback from Ko and Christina, I tweaked t a bit more. When I was happy with it, I began doing some research on what kind of feel I wanted the animation to have.
Since it was a short 4 second audio, I knew I couldn’t do much with it but I did have a personal goal to make it dynamic and fun.
I feel like my last animation exercises felt too static and honestly boring, and I think I find my visual language in wacky, exaggerated things. I even wrote on the blog a few months ago how I wanted to let go of my perfectionism and just DO IT.
This is the perfect exercise to do so as the song is so ‘silly’ and so not serious.
I looked at some animations on Vimeo and found the following:
I’ve always been a fan of the music video above. I know for a fact I will NEVER get tired of it. It’s just so gorgeous, so fluid. Both visually and in the way the different narratives flow so seamlessly into each other. My favourite moment and the one I am using as reference is at 01:44, when the head goes into the character’s body and everything around it flourishes. God, it’s so beautiful.
I find it interesting how the squash and stretch principle is constantly used, specially in morphing scenes. The characters adapt impossible anatomical shapes to convey this.
I really like the line quality as well. I probably won’t be looking so much into this as I’ll be focusing more on quality of animation rather than having a polished clean finish look. But for future reference, this is something I’d like to experiment with.
I also particularly like the fisheye lense effect on some of the scenes where the characters are flying around.
The film above has such a cool childlike feel to it. It’s vibrant and easy to read. Also, the birds wear trousers and have jobs, which is always a plus.
The fact that it looks like it might have been made on Microsoft Paint is just amazing. Ironically, I like that there is not line art too. (I say ironically since I’m a big fan of a good line art’.).
What I enjoy about this film is the plasticity of it. Love the colour blocks and different shapes. Even in the end credits, where they use the shapes on the film to spell names. The melting effect as characters start to loose their cool is very interesting..
Yes, Laura Jayne again. This is one of her college exercises too and I found it brilliant for a lip-sync exercise. Again- shapes!!
Shapes to describe sound, such an efficient method. The way she makes these shapes bigger or smaller on the screen according to the volume of the sounds really makes it easy to distinguish all the different sounds.
Very much reminds me of this classic:
It’s not a lip sync exercise because there are no mouths singing or speaking, but there is definitely an exercise of sound and image coordination.
I also looked at different isync sheets to help me understand how to design different mouth shapes.
Source: http://animationlessons.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/3/1/23310674/6164199_orig.jpg
After researching, I began roughly sketching out the animation and this is what a few hours of planning and sketching resulted in:
I will continue to work on it until submissions, but I’m pretty happy with the overall flow of it! I think the lip-sync works well but I do have to draw some in-betweens, still feels a little rough.