ANIMATION FUNDAMENTALS - PROJECT 2

12/05/21 -11/06/21 (Week 7 - Week 11)

Animation Fundamentals

Project 2 - Character Walk Cycle

                                                                                                                                                                  

INSTRUCTIONS

Project 2 - Character Lip Sync and Acting

Week 7 (12/05/2021)

For our project 2, we are required to animate our character's lip sync and acting on Adobe Animate. We are told to use the same character we had used for our first project. Ms Jennifer had showed us an example on how to do lip syncing and acting on her own character. Here's the example shown to us:

 

Fig 1.0 Example (Ms Jennifer's Character)

After taking a closer look at the example, I felt more prepared to start working on the project. As usual, I start off with references for the lip movements first. Here are images that I referred to for this project:

Fig 1.1 Reference 1 (Lip sync)

Fig 1.2 Reference 2 (Lip sync)

After gathering sufficient references, I chose one audio that best fits my character. Ms Jennifer had provided us with various types of audio files. I had chosen this audio clip due to it's adorable voice and it seems suitable for my character which is a little girl with a cheeky personality.

 

Chosen audio clip (Boo from Monsters Inc)

Afterwards, I began working on my background design in Adobe Illustrator. My idea was to set my character in a cute girlish bedroom with toys. 

Fig 1.3 Background design (Draft)

For my first draft, I noticed the composition of the objects were too cluttered and close to each other which makes it quite distracting and visually unpleasant. So I decided to move the objects to a better position.

Fig 1.4 Final background design for project 2

Once I completed the background design, it was time to focus solely on my character. To start off, I needed to decide on my key poses for this project. We were told to create 3/4 key poses only. So I referred to "Hilda" the animated series for interesting poses as her character is quite similar to mine and "Spongebob Squarepants". Here are some references I managed to gather:

Fig 1.5 Reference 1 (Pose)

Fig 1.6 Reference 2 (Pose)

Fig 1.7 Reference 3 (Pose)

From the references gathered I proceeded to animate my character. 

Fig 1.8 Work process

Fig 1.9 Work process

Fig 1.10 Added background

After completing all the key poses, I added the background into my animate file. Here's my final character lip sync and acting:

Final Character Lip sync and Acting - Project 2

Reflection: After completing this project, I felt like lip syncing is quite challenging because this is entirely new to me. I have never done something like this before so being able to do it makes me happy to learn something new but at the same time it was very time consuming. I had to refer to various animations and short videos on Youtube to see more examples for a deeper understanding. Nonetheless, this project was really fun to do as we could incorporate the background design as well!