Welcome back the last post and the last day for the Oktober animation test! I will basically go over what I did on the last day of the test, which involves animating the lip sync and adding in the polishing touches to the animation, to add that cherry on top of a already delicious animated cake :).
The last day of the test, I pretty much had everything in place, the animation should feels good with overlaps, offsets and the timing were spot on to my liking. The one thing that I haven't done yet is the lip sync, and it is something I always felt that you can't really block out, and the reason for that is because the dialogue itself is not blocked out, so you can't really get that sense of timing with the lip movement through blocking, and it would just look really weird. You can potentially block out the lip sync, but I think you would need to block out the poses on every second frame to really get a hold of timing in my opinion. Before even starting to pose the lips, I would listen to the dialogue out a few times, sometimes even take video references of my lips to get some new fresh ideas on how to pose the lips. I would then write out the words on paper, and I would write down the words in a phonetic sense based on the dialogue, with the words written down I would then note the areas where the mouth would open or close, there is more to it then that of course, I just don't want to go into details on that, at a later post maybe :P. I would basically pose the lip position in spline, and as I pose the lips I will also put in the eye brown positions. The thing I love about lip syncing is that the timing for the mouth is already in place for you, and you really only need to position the lips in interesting and convincing ways :). The tongue is something I don't really concern too much, and it really depends on how close your character will be to the shot, the closer the shot is to the character's face, the more time you will need to spend on the tongue. Blinking is probably the easiest thing to add to any character, the trick with it, is that you have to make sure that there is at least three frame hold when the eyes close, this will make it fast enough to be a blink and long enough for the audience to feel the blink, anything faster will start feeling really awkward. When animating the face and the eye browns you don't want it to be too animated, you want to have more holds in between poses, then have poses for every word, if you video yourself saying a dialogue, you will notice that you don't tend to change your eye brown position a lot, there maybe subtle and quick changes, but never large movements.
With the lip sync all in place and the animation looking "oh!" so fine~, I moved onto polishing the animation, at this stage you should be happy with the overall animation, as a matter of fact you can pretty much start rendering it out. The thing that I think a lot of starting animators don't quite understand, (especially me when I was told about polishing) is that polishing is just about adding the small little touches to the animation, there should be no changes at all to the core animation. Polishing is all about, adding the little compression in fingers, the little staggers and shakes that happen in a angry person's hand, the squishes in the cheeks as a person touches their face, the follow through that can happen with a character's jaw, subtle small things that makes audience feel that softness in the animation. Polishing to me is like that last little scrape off a already prefect sculpture, and that scrape is the difference between perfection and godlike. So don't panic about polishing, if anything it should be pretty mindless fun :).
So that was pretty much the four day test, I could go into a lot more details on what I did on those four days, but what I really wanted to give everyone was a general idea of what could be done in four days time. The one thing to come out of this is the importance of planning, I don't think I would have managed to get the animation done, if I didn't spend the time in planning, throughout the four days I wasn't really stressing out about the time, and I wasn't panicking or struggling with the body mechanics, and I think that is all due to good planning on day one. I really had a lot fun doing the test, and I was happy with my outcome, I am of course disappointed that Oktober didn't invite me into their internship for "Aliens Vs Monsters", but I guess they had their reasons ( Might have been the tie and vest in the interview that threw them off).
I hope these posts has been kinda helpful, again what I am writing in these post, are not from a professional background, they are more from experience, things that I have come across during my animation study, and my study of life itself. So I hope you enjoy the end results, it could still do with a lot more work of course :).
Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit
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