ANI107 - CHARACTER PERFORMANCE

FINAL PIECE

Below is the finished clip for my character performance animation. Overall I found the process to be quite challenging despite having experience in lip syncing and character work in the past. What made this difficult was that the dialogue I was animating to was very natural and life-like. As in, it was not scripted or acted out like movie dialogues are. It was just a recording of two people having a conversation and as such, the speed of speech and conversational stutters were hard to tackle. 

I'm also really bad at both drawing hands and animating hands, which proved to be a bit of a road block. Having the character have his hand on the side of his face with a phone in his hand was not easy but I pulled through in the end.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofl1JGGy9gc

DEVELOPMENT

I will be animating to a sound clip from a podcast called "Hey Ash! Wat'cha Playin'?" In the audio, Anthony Burch is telling his sister Ashley Burch about a time he was working in Blockbuster and started crying during one of his lunch breaks. I always found the clip hilarious and the way the Anthony described what had happened with such detail and expression that I could imagine exactly how it played out. I thought it would be perfect to animate to. 

It's only the first 30-35 seconds that i will be animating but there is a lot of fast speech that will prove challenging to animate. It is also a phone conversation so Anthony will have his phone to his ear the whole time. This will add a welcome difficulty to it, not only because I am terrible at drawing hands but because I will have to animate secondary animations with a character who has his hand on the side of his face the whole time. But all this is fine as I want to push myself and do things I haven't done before.

Below is an animation I did last year where there is a lot of lip syncing. I've been using it for a bit of a referencing and to also see where my mistakes where and how I could improve. 

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Going back to the fact that I'm not very good at drawing hands, I grabbed a collection of pictures of people talking on the phone and decided to draw them, just for a bit of practice. I know that I want to be using different camera angles so I would have to get used to drawing them from a variety of positions. 

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When designing the character who would be acting over the audio, I decided to model him after the actual Anthony Burch. I did this so that I could use his actual face as reference for the words he spoke. There are loads of videos of him on the internet because he used to be a Video Game Journalist on Destructoid.com and had made a series of videos called rev rants in which he would single out a gaming topic and rant about it. 

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What I had in mind was that the entire animation would take place in the kitchen. Anthony will be talking on the phone and using the kitchen props to assist in his expressions. Opening cupboards, holding a bowl, maybe pouring a glass of milk. I want to make the conversation look as natural as possible. I took some photos of my kitchen and used them as reference. The pictures below will be more or less the same shots I will be using. 

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ANIMATIC

ANIMATED SCENES