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Lip Sync Final Evaluation

I didn’t really see much point in doing weekly summaries and faking them if I hadn’t actually done them, so I decided to write a longer evaluation and explain what happened and where I went wrong with this project instead. 

My anxiety and depression has severely handicapped me for this unit, starting in around October, and coming to a big summit during December - January. Without going into immense detail, I have a very strained and complicated relationship with my Dad, and have ever since he and my Mum decided to split when I was 12. I’ve been diagnosed with agitated depression since I was around 14/15. A few years ago I decided to cut my Dad out of my life before starting uni, hoping it would make me a lot more stable and able to focus on my studies, which was something I really wanted to pursue as animation is a huge passion of mine. In October last year I made the decision to try and salvage a relationship with him, and have had bouts of massive low moods since as it did not go as hoped.

With all of that being said, my depression prevents me from doing a lot of things, namely getting out of bed or finding the motivation to do the simplest of tasks. Work simply was not on my mind, which is quite hard to admit seeing as I feel like I have fought a lot with both myself and people around me to study at university. In the past I have managed to somewhat pull myself back and just scrape by with the right grades, but I do not feel like my work for this lip sync unit is good enough. 

Time was not spent on researching, experimenting and using iteration to conceive better outcomes. I didn’t start working on this project until quite far into the unit after I had been granted an extension, and it can be told in my work. That being said, the positive things I can take from this unit are; the fact that I realise now how important the degree and finishing it is to me (even if this means redoing the unit/year if it comes to that), how important my mental health is, the gravity of both peer feedback as well as individual tutorials and advice from my lecturers (something that I do not utilise enough by far), and just how much I actually enjoy animation. Not doing well is a feeling that I absolutely hate, and am determined to change in the future.

Lip sync itself is something I find very enjoyable. The only method I have used to it is creating a null object (and then turning it into a slider) and slowly animating and sounding out the words myself as I go along. I find I could do it for hours if the time prohibits it, but I also found that I tried to include too much. The beginning of my lip sync is quite messy - there’s phonics everywhere. It definitely needs a tidy up and a review on which ones are key and will get the word across better than a massive word tumble.

I feel I have learnt the most from this unit about my work than I have throughout all of my summaries and evaluations. I never really find it difficult to pinpoint areas that I need to improve upon, and this evaluation was full of them; my animations need to be clearer with more defined and gestured lineart, I need to focus more on the sounds than the actual words themselves, backstory and referencing are key, and finding the motivation and time to actually do the work is crucial.

I can only hope that in the future I do not make the same mistakes and, instead of dropping everything when I’m in a low mood, I decide to focus on things that actually make me happy, like animation.

#lipsync

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Lip Sync Animation + Reel

This is nowhere near as polished as it should be - not much time was spent on it as I spent a lot of time on my narrative strategies and bestiary coursework. Lip sync is actually something I find fun - especially in AE by using a null object as a slider. 

Some improvements I want to make:

more animation in the characters themselves, they really lack it in this and I feel like it would bring it to life a lot more

clearer lineart - this is very sketchy and although I know that that was allowed, it seems so unfinished 

better backstory and more research into a plot

perhaps some colour, as that really polishes off an animation nicely

#lipsync

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Set up

These are my basic characters for lip sync. It’s supposed to depict a man who is quite egotistical and his wife/girlfriend, getting bored and telling him to leave the room. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to do more than extremes, which will get the message across a lot easier than without.

#lipsync

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Mouth Shapes

Revised mouth shapes that I also used for my lip sync for last year’s project with my own character, Robbie the raccoon. These are rough shapes and I drew them on my iPad, but I might clean them up later if I decide to go for a polished look.

#lipsync

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Research: South Park

South Park is an adult animated TV show animated using cardboard cutout paper (essentially stop motion) and is inspired by the paper cut-out cartoons made by Terry Gilliam for Monty Python's Flying Circus. There are different mouth shapes that are cut out and placed on top of characters instead of being drawn or fixed on like with a stop motion puppet. 

#lipsync

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Lip Sync Brief

Two characters, one talks one reacts, from the waist up

1 shot, any situation

#lipsync

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Bestiary Final Evaluation

This project has by far been the hardest for me in terms of time and capacity. I severely overshot myself, thinking I could complete and entire body of work in a little amount of time, and due to this, I had to reduce my workload and just submit tests instead, as I wasn’t happy with submitting work that was sloppy or didn’t look right. I think it’s a valuable lesson in the life of animation, as I often leave myself very little time and end up somehow pulling through, but this time I do not feel the same way.

I enjoyed the whole idea of a bestiary - making my own creature, inventing things, but I feel like I did none of that. When I look at my peers work, they actually invented things, whereas I stuck with a cat that was mythical in the sense that it belonged to mythology, and not because it possessed a unique appearance or power. If I were to do this again, I would definitely put more work into creating something completely my own, as drawing the same cat over and over again became quite tedious and made me almost not want to do the work. 

In terms of quality, I don’t feel like its up to standard. I can notice a lot of things that need changing; the green rim around some of my final animations from where I keyed out a green screen, jumpy animations due to not enough inbetweens, not enough motion in general - this is my biggest flaw I believe, and just general tidbits that I can notice and other people probably can’t. I believe a lot of this is down to my lack of contact time. I didn’t get enough advice or review on my work and how it was going, which severely handicapped my ability to work to a professional and high enough standard, and it is something I now want to change and work on in future assignments.

I’ve been undergoing a lot of stress mentally the entirety of the second half of this unit, and am surprised I even produced what I have - lip sync was definitely a poor performance on my behalf, however - so I do feel some pride and accomplishment, but I feel like a lot of it is out-shadowed by the fact that I just don’t think I’m doing well enough and its down to my attendance. My anxiety often prevents me attending, which is something that I’m going to take measures to overcome and hopefully sort out in the second half of this year so that I can take my third year seriously and hopefully graduate with a good grade.

#bestiary

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Experimentation Reel

#bestiary

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Finished Animations

My final animations ended up being just the test ones that I did for a cat similar to my character. Due to time limits, I couldn’t properly animate my storyboards to a standard that I wanted, so decided to go with these instead.

#bestiary

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Bestiary Weekly Summary #7

After looking at the works of Muybridge and Williams, I am slightly more confident and understanding of how the legs of animals work - its like two completely different sets of legs put together on one body, which shouldn’t be too difficult providing I use references and constantly check to see whether the animation looks right. Hopefully I will begin my animation process soon, so that I can get underway with finishing this project.

#bestiary

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Research: Richard Williams [Book]

Richard Williams is the writer of the infamous Animators Survival Kit, which is a highly recommended book for my university course. From it, I found this page which I can compare with Muybridge’s photo collections of cats and animals in motion to create a very detailed, life-like walk cycle.

#bestiary

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Research: Eadweard Muybridge [Book]

A book I bought around the time I decided I wanted to animate a cat. Muybridge is known for his photographs of animals in motion - which help depict and show how an animal moving works. I thought this would be useful in examining the movement and walk cycle of a cat to animate.

#bestiary

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Bestiary Weekly Summary #5+6

After going through all my Paris photos and finding the ones I liked and felt I could use best with the plot, I drew up some small storyboards with the actual photos as backgrounds so I could examine whether I think it would work - which I do, but I think it will be a lengthly process and it would take a lot of time to get right. I still haven’t looked into animating 4-legged animals, so I hope to do that soon and then begin on my animating.

#bestiary

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Brief Storyboards

Some brief storyboards I mocked up in Procreate on my iPad. At this point I was simply looking for the extreme poses in the action for direction on how long and how the animation should take place on the screen. 

#bestiary

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Location Concepts

These are my brief location concepts. I wanted to make sure they fit the right aesthetic and didn’t look too out of place. They are all taken around the city of Paris when I travelled there for my birthday last year. I think it makes for a good sequence - scaling buildings, a walk cycle into the louvre, and then a run cycle with secondary animation in a scroll.

I have yet to mock up the full storyboards, and will hopefully do these so they all fit on one page within my character bible (or a page each depending on their length, which I haven’t figured out yet).

#bestiary

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Bestiary Weekly Summary #4

This week I began and finished both my character and model sheets, which I think I produced to quite a high standard. One of the issues I ran into was the cat itself and the confusion I get when I try to animate or figure out how to animate all 4 legs in motion at once. To progress further with this and install some confidence into myself, I want to research into the work of other 4-legged animations, and perhaps into Muybridge, who did a series of plates dedicated to the movement of animals.

#bestiary

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Research: Hotel Transylvania [Book]

“Dracula, who operates a high-end resort away from the human world, goes into overprotective mode when a boy discovers the resort and falls for the count's teenaged daughter.” These are pictures extracted from the “Art of” book.

One of the main reasons I wanted to look into this book for mythical creature research was the character design sheets - they give good incite into the kinda content people look for in a character bible, and they’re also based on classic novel characters that have been modernised. Dracula is usually seen as a feared vampire, sucking the blood of innocents, but in this he is a doting and protecting father to his daughter, Mavis. 

#bestiary