Elective 1: Lip Sync

Week 1:

Goals for lip-sync:

• Learn Toon Boom well and actually remember how to use it so I’m not constantly wanting to give up and hating what I’m doing.
• Create dynamic, interesting and expressive characters and learn to exaggerate with them.
• Try to interview some random people to branch out of my comfort zone and do this with the project in general particularly in character designs (try to branch out and get creative)

Jess played us one of Aemilia’s ‘London’ recordings and we had to draw what came to mind and keep drawing. Being entirely honest I wasn’t very good at this as I sort of had one idea and then just kept drawing that (two pigeons interacting) rather than an array of different ideas and thoughts that came to mind more fluidly, but I did have a lot of fun trying to characterise the people that we were hearing in the audio clip.

https://pin.it/3kEZJAAR4 – LINK TO PINTEREST BOARD OF INSPO

From my Pinterest board that I created for this project, I took the images which felt most relevant to the ideas that I was having about a convenience store/supermarket but also I wanted to look at colour and tone. Supermarkets and stores seem to have a lot of bright and quite clinical lighting – they’re not full of a lot of warmth. But convenience stores feel a bit more cluttered and almost nostalgic in vibe, they are depicted a lot warmer with greens and oranges and in some purples and these are the sorts of colours that I would consider using myself to create an animation which has it’s own atmosphere but also feels quite familiar to people and to myself.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/06/lucy-sparrow-felt-corner-store/

Lucy Sparrow’s Felt corner store (all 3 of her projects, the English Corner store, the Bodega and the 80s supermarket), I absolutely adore the aesthetic of her projects and how creative and fun they are with each of the little details which Lucy has put into her works which makes the stores and their content feel so real and familiar and yet they are made of just felt. There’s something so whimsical about her creations which really drew me to them, I love that it’s so realistic and yet it’s all been carefully hand crafted. The charm that she brings to the landscape of a supermarket is the vibe I want to bring to my animation particularly in my backgrounds.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/189364305/Supermarket-Nightmare

Laura Sivernt’s ‘supermarket nightmare’ is really cool, I came across it whilst creating my mood board and looking for more directly relevant imagery, instead of just visual design inspiration and colour palette. I really like the detail in the background and of the objects that she’s holding and I love the lighting, I feel it really captures the vibe of a supermarket very well and it will be good to look at for inspiration when designing my supermarket’s background.

My moodboard here is comprised of different images that I took of different convenience stores both on the exterior and the interior, whilst they aren’t from angles I’m properly considering using in my animation, It was helpful to look at the general layout, colour scheme and vibes of stores like this.

Different audio clips:

• one audio I recorded with a lady on the train BUT I LEFT MY HEADPHONES CONNECTED AND YOU CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING AHHHHH.
• 2 audios are with my nan about how much London sucks
• 1 is with my 2 friends whilst we were queuing to enter a musical (Hadestown) and I was interviewing them with random questions about how they feel about London

I wasn’t initially sure which audio clip I wanted to work with, the one with the lady on the train was not an option as the audio was so badly muffled you can barely hear a word of it, but I quite liked both the conversations with my nan and the one with my friends so I wrote out different platform’s for both of them so that I could have a better understanding of which one would work better. The concept for the animation with my friends as audio came to me a lot easier than the one with my Nan but Jess pointed out that a lot of the audio was laughter which would be hard to animate well and also cuts the amount of lip sync that takes place. Ultimately I decided to use the second clip of my nan as not only was it quite funny but I thought it would be quite fun to work with a supermarket setting and easier to work with one main character rather than multiple on screen at once.

Initially, I found it quite hard to get my head around what actually went into a beat sheet so I wrote up a couple different versions before working on my story board so I knew vaguely what I wanted to depict. The sheet is a lot more complex than my final story version, it had a lot more varying angles and a more focus on the cashier when considering these ideas and visuals myself and from talking to Jess I realised that these were a bit too complicated the time limit of the project and it would affect the clarity of the animation as too many cuts would make it confusing.

Before I started properly storyboarding digitally for my animatic, I did a rough sketch to help me map out the key points of the animation and the sort of angles and perspectives that I would want for my animatic. I find it quite hard to immediately think when drawing digitally or even just working on animatics so this helped me a lot to have a clearer understanding of what I was going to capture for my animatic which I could then work on timing out my ideas.

My first animatic was very rough, but it did help to clarify the visuals that I wanted to go for in terms of spacing and perspectives. I think it works quite well to have a lot of the animation from behind the counter/from the cashiers perspective as it is slightly more comedic and also clearer in terms of the lip sync and understanding who’s talking and perspective. I also used this storyboard to begin to consider vague ideas for character design as I found it very hard to create a storyboard without having even a vague character in place, as it’s hard for me to understand and visualise what I want without it. Overall, whilst this automatic was very rough, it was very useful in getting the ball rolling and helping to spark ideas and changes that I could make to the next iterations.

I started brainstorming, whilst working, different designs for my cashier. I knew I wanted to push myself away from the style that I usually use somewhat so I started by considering different shapes that I could use for my characters. I was quite inspired by the activity that we did with Jess where we used two words and random objects to design different characters. I wanted them to have a different sort of head shape than what I usually lean towards and this activity was very helpful helping me to think outside the box. I considered different eye shapes as well, especially more semicircle types because I thought they could convey the expression of the cashier and my main character very well. I also thought about how they would look when looking around or with different expressions, like if they would turn rounded surprised for example. These initial ideas were very useful in encouraging my thought process when working on the actual character designs.

With this activity, I really enjoyed making different characters from the words shy and funky and random objects around the classroom. I helped me to consider shape and form for character design. and how more random/abstract shapes could be effective in creating the shaping and proportions of a character. I find myself drifting towards familiar shapes and styles all the time when designing characters so this really helped me to try and think and push myself outside of that box when I was considering my different character designs.

From our lesson on character design, I found these images incredibly helpful from the Walt Disney Family Museum in looking at the different types of shape language that is often used in animation and how I can utilise this when creating my own characters. I know that I want the main character to have a rounder shape as I want them to look quite cosy and welcoming but then to contrast that with their quite bleak and cynical dialogue about London. My cashier I want to have be quite triangular, they aren’t necessarily ‘menacing’ but I want them to seem quite unwelcoming and contrast the customer’s vibe.

One of the artist’s that I was introduced to in our character lesson was Beatrice Blue! I absolutely adore the style of her works and her use of expression and shape. Whilst her character’s are clearly marketed towards children, I really liked looking at the way she utilises colour and a lot of vibrant colour palettes which whilst are quite full and busy they are still very warm and complementary and they don’t feel overwhelming or like everything is clashing. I also like how expressive and dynamic her character’s are in the character tests on the right and the way that the girl’s face squashes and stretches is something I want to make sure to utilise with my own character designs.

For both characters, I created six different design options with different face shapes and different styles of dress and hair. I did generally know that I wanted my main character to be sort of a middle-age older woman  with curly hair which would be dyed on the ends and then I wanted my cashier to be in contrast to that; where my main characters would use a lot of softer rounded shapes and my cashier would be a bit more spiky and younger but I did play around a lot for the cashier with different shapes and different noses which changed the vibe and the dynamic of the character’s visuals. As well as this, different eyes, face shapes for some would fit better and the slightly different style on the hair made the design look more fluid. I had two main different options for the cashiers design, one being a bit more rounder and slightly soft at the edges and the other being a lot more pointy and spiky. I really liked both designs but ultimately I went with design B as A didn’t contrast the main character enough whereas B felt closer to an opposite of the main character’s design. For the design of the main lady I tried out a lot of different things. I knew I kinda wanted her to have a round of silhouette and quite a dramatic irritating jacket and a lot of bits of jewellery would be quite clashing and visually bold especially in contrast to her hair. I tried a lot of different shapes for the face and also a lot of different hairstyles with some down and some larger and a bun. The head shape on the top left that I first came up with was my favourite but I wanted to draw in some of the face design from the top right as well as the style of the middle bottom row’s jacket. By combining these elements I came up with a character design that I really liked visually and I thought would work well with the personality of the voice of my character.

I started to consider the colour palette of my characters how I would like them to look with each other. I want the main character’s jacket to be quite bright colour, as well as the jewellery being vivid but still stay cohesive so it wasn’t a complete colour clash but it was still, vibrant and bold. I think the purple jacket works best for this as whilst the blues and orange are quite nice, visually they clash a lot more and look less appealing. I struggled quite a bit with creating the cashiers palette as I wanted the uniform to look pretty standard to what you’d expect from the supermarket/corner store, but I also wanted them to maintain the vibe of them standing out somewhat from the surroundings that they’re in, so I need to revisit the colour palette for this design when I work on my turnarounds.

Again, I found it quite hard to visualise my turnaround immediately digitally because there is simply just something about drawing on a laptop without sketching my idea first that just doesn’t click in my head yet I think it’s just me adapting to using a laptop and a wacom tablet instead of an iPad so I did some rough sketches of what the upper angles of my turnarounds for both characters would look like.

Week 2:

Animatic take two. This one was a lot clearer and more cohesive than the previous animatic however at this stage it is still a bit too complicated, in terms of angles and how much detail there is and how much focus there is on my cashier instead of the main character who is talking. Looking at it with Jess, she recommended that I take out the moment where the cashier starts scanning items and cut straight to the main character talking and to have less back-and-forth between the main character and the cashier so instead of multiple cuts I will just have the one when she talks about people being very unfriendly to emphasise the unsocial nature of people in London and also take out the end part with the lollipop as it is pretty unnecessary to my narrative. I also think that my character’s body language could be a lot more exaggerated and dramatic when she is talking so I need to work on adding that in to enhance my animation. For my next iteration of my animatic, I will implement these improvements.

In this lesson we learn about the importance of values in a background and how effective a strong values palette is in making a clear and coherent colour scheme for your backgrounds. We did this colouring exercise with a pre-drawn black background where we chose a mood and created the values to reflect that, I chose the word ‘gloomy’ and tried to reflect that within the lighting in the room that I was colouring and the contrast in highlights to dark as well as somewhat my use of texture and hatching. I think the word quite well and this activity was very useful in understanding how values can help to set the mood and atmosphere of a space.

I did some rough sketches to get a better idea of what I wanted from the layout of my backgrounds. I wanted them to feel like the almost calming chaos of a convenience store whilst also trying to have them be not too distracting with the level of detail I wanted to include particularly in the background for the moment where we look at the cashier. I think it would be beneficial to blur the details of all the bottles and items behind the cashier so that our focus isn’t too drawn to them and we actually look at them as they react to the customer. I want the background behind the main character to be quite simple and almost blank with a gradient to it so that our focus isn’t drawn too much to looking at what’s behind them but rather what they are doing/ saying. When I draw up these designs digitally I will consider more on the values and colour schemes but I feel they should be quite complementary to the main character’s scheme.

When designing my convenience store, one of the key memories in my head of a story with a supermarket/store in was ‘Raymond Rabbit Goes Shopping’ from my own childhood. The colour palette of the book is very warm and welcoming but everything is somewhat hazy and fuzzy which sort of blends everything together and especially blurs out the backgrounds. I think it demonstrates very successfully how you can blur elements of your backgrounds and designs to put more focus on what’s in the foreground and also use that to create atmosphere and shape for characters. I don’t want to make my own characters fuzzy like Raymond rabbit but I do like the idea of blurring my backgrounds and using complementary vibrant colours like this story book, so I will be experimenting with this as I develop my backgrounds.

Nora turnarounds and expression sheet

I finally worked on my turnaround, expression sheet and final colour palette for my main character who I have now called Nora. I took a lot of details from the various versions of her designs that I explored and put them together to create this final design which I really like. I think she has quite a strong silhouette with a lot of cohesive soft shapes but they still feel quite dramatic, which is what I wanted from her design. I also simplified her jewellery somewhat because I knew animating this consistently would be an absolute pain. I’m sure that this turnaround will be very useful whilst animating to make sure that I stay consistent to her design and shape. I settled on using a colour palette of pink and purple with the contrasting colour being teal as I liked how it flowed together. It felt vibrant without being overpowering and visually overwhelming. Creating the expression sheet was very simple as I’ve tried to design Nora’s face so that it could quite easily be expressive especially with the lines in her face and eye shape. I think these different expressions will be very useful to refer back to whilst I animate and also to consider her body language alongside the dialogue.

Dave turnaround and expression sheet:

I found my cashiers turnaround a lot easier to capture than Nora’s, I have also now named him Dave. I wanted in his turnaround for him to be slightly slouched with loose arms because that somewhat reflects the sort of moody teenager young adult bored with the job that I wanted to put across. For some reason I found this colour palette to be a lot harder to visualise and I’m not too sure why. I think I wanted it to be a lot more muted but I also wanted their hair to be dyed without looking too similar to Nora‘s design but I think the red and the darker teal with the bright yellow works pretty well in creating a simple yet effective colour palette. The expression sheet for Dave was quite fun to do because I wanted to have him be expressive but at the same time for his expressions to still feel quite flat so like when he smiles it seems slightly sarcastic whilst it also could be interpreted like a genuine smile and I think that these different expressions will definitely help what goes into my animation as a reference point for me to it back on.

Before working on my own turnarounds, I took a look at some existing turnarounds from media like Paranormal and SpongeBob to look at the way that they capture different angles on characters with very diverse and dynamic features and how a design that is flat from a front angle can have a lot more dimension when put at a side or 3/4 angle. It was nice to refresh the important things to consider when working on turnarounds and have some examples to look at.

Mouth shapes

I only did a mouth shape sheet for Nora as Dave doesn’t have any dialogue. I found it quite easy to create this sheet as I had done some lip sync work before so I had an understanding of the type of mouth shapes that I would need and I know that this will be a really valuable piece of material for me to work with when I do my lip sync as it will be pretty easy for me to just refer to my sheet for me to know what I need to use. I’m sure there will be some that will need another transitional shape as I go along but I’ll cross that bridge when/ it it comes to it. I also drew a happier and more flat and frown expression for certain mouth shapes because when drawing them, the wide smile version did not feel remotely like how I knew that my character would be speaking and it would not portray had heard her voice very accurately.

My final version of my animatic; I implemented all the changes that I had considered from animatic version 2. I took out a lot of the cuts between the cashier and Nora and I also took out the moment at the start where items are being scanned as well as the moment at the end where the cashier throws their lollipop onto the ground. I think it now flows a lot better and is a lot clearer and easier to understand as it doesn’t jump from character to character a lot. I think it might be better for the character to pick something of the shelf next to them instead of taking something from the basket as that would not flow as well and it wouldn’t make logistical sense for where the basket would be therefore I will change this in my final animation and add this change to my beat sheet so that I remember. Overall, this animatic has been very useful in helping me to plan out the timing for my animation and the key beats for it – this should make it a lot easier to start working on my keyframes.

Beat sheet (final version): Before starting to animate, I did another beat sheet so that I would have a really clear understanding of what each moment of the animation needed to hit and what the key moments would be. I also adapted some of the moments in my final animatic to make them fit the setting better and also to make it a bit easier to animate logistically, so instead of her picking up a tomato from her basket and dropping it back in she will now pick up a chocolate bar from the shelving which she will them pass over to the cashier before she continues to talk at them. I think these clear points will help me to make sure that I stay on track when animating and have all the key moments in there.

Prince of Egypt Task:

• A lot of squash and stretch put into the neck to exaggerate his movement with the dramatic lean forward to heighten his frustration and exasperation.
• Left hand very static but his right hand holding the staff is far more expressive and it moves with his body and used to gesture and emphasise Moses’ points.
• Eyes, mouth and jaw stretch to almost unrealistic proportions when he reaches for Rameses -> really highlights emotion particularly when he tilts with full body into his face.
• Clear squash and stretch in the bob up and down when moving forward to clearly show him walking forward even tho we don’t see his full body movement and we can understand clearly that he’s moving forward through space.
• A lot of facial expression with heavy emphasis done with the eyebrows and his eye shape widening and narrowing to convey his feelings.

X sheets: This was my first time creating X sheets for an animation and it was a very interesting process. Initially I found it a bit challenging to capture the sounds that were being said in the dialogue as some of it was quite fast paced and other bits I wasn’t sure which would be the best shape to depict/what sounds should be excluded. I also found it just quite an arduous task as it involved a lot of pause and play and repeat listening. As I went along, I found it a lot easier to quickly identify the sounds that were being said. It was a lot easier to go back in and add my notes for the movements after I had the sounds down as I was able to look at my animatic and beat sheet to better understand what moment I was at but also consider what kinds of small expressions and movements I could have my character do to make it more dynamic.

I experimented with the background behind where Dave would stand to try and work out what level of blur would work best so that the background isn’t too distracting and bold but also so that it doesn’t feel like its incredibly far away or incredibly out of focus. I tried a very heavy blur of the background which was similar to the Raymond Rabbit storybook but it made the background feel like it was very far from the foreground, I also considered not blurring it but my peers pointed out that this would be very distracting with a character on top because we would be drawn to focus on all the details in the background. I settled on a blur that was somewhere in the middle so that it didn’t feel like the wall was miles away from the cashier and entirely out of focus but it would hopefully not be too distracting.

Getting the values right on my backgrounds was quite complex as I had a clear heavy dark with the scanning screen being in all of the shots but then I had to make sure everything else wasn’t also too dark and that – particularly with the wall behind the cashier – it wasn’t too overpowering but not entirely flat and lacking dimension. I think considering the values helped me to better understand the setting I was building and also the colours that I wanted to use. I tried to keep a lot of the background elements in a lot of similar muted colours so that it wouldn’t be overly distracting and garish whilst still being quite fun. I tied in warm purples as I found that the character’s stood well against this backdrop and it worked well with the colour palette of Nora. I struggled quite a bit with the background that would be where Nora would stand as I had initially planned to make it a flat gradient but that felt too dead and dull with no character to it but then adding in more items made it feel to cluttered and I knew that she wouldn’t be the main focus if the background was crowded. I put in slight hints of fridges and shelvings and some snippets of colour and ‘objects’ in these places and heavily blurred it. I think this works very well and Nora stands out effectively against these backgrounds.

Learning to use ToonBoom was quite a daunting experience for me. I was quite apprehensive to learn a completely knew software and didn’t know what to expect but I actually greatly enjoyed the process of learning to use and then creating an animation with ToonBoom. I am glad that I was able to easily understand the software and also remember the important shortcuts and how to create different layers etc. Working on my rough keys was interesting as I had never created rough’s for an entire animation that I was working on – only opting to sketch rough versions when I was stuck on something, so having this opportunity to create more messy keyframes which I could later refine was great as I focused less on making it look perfect and clean and rather more focused on the character acting and emotions/reactions that I wanted to express. I am excited to clean up these keys so I can refine them so that they are easier to understand and have more consistent shape. I think I want my character to boil throughout because it will add to her texture and design so I will be sure to be redrawing each frame and perhaps boil the scanning screen every second frame so that it isn’t as intense.

Cleaning my keys took a lot longer than I had anticipated. I really struggled for some reason in pushing through with cleaning them up, I think it may have been because as my rough keys went along they got a lot messier and unclear which made it harder for me to easily just reflect what the frame was meant to show. When I was drawing my clean keys, I ended up somewhat inbetweening sections of my keys as it was hard for me to understand the motion without having something to make it clearer and because of doing this it did make it easier when it came to in-between the rest of the frames. Again I struggled with getting this done in a timely manner, for some reason I only managed to do a couple of frames a day. Once I began to reach the section before the cashier came in, I realised that what was prolonging the process so much was that I was redrawing every frame for my want for movement on the edges of my characters – my aesthetic choice that I had made earlier in the project had come back to bite me and bite me it did. I from that moment on decided to only redraw the whole frame every two the same as the checkout screen which then began to speed up my inbetweening process considerably. I can’t say I greatly enjoyed the process of inbetweening because for some bits where it was simple I had an alright time but the standing up and down and many of the hand movements were very complex for me to navigate in my head. I did a few timing charts for tricky spots and arcs for my hand movements but what I found really helped me the most was taking my own reference images for those moments or even simply acting along with my character to understand how one would move in those sections and not look strange. I think doing this was something that helped me the most and I’m certain I will definitely do again when I am animating as it definitely gave me a better understanding of how the movements I wanted to express would look on the human body. Despite my struggles with time management and animation itself. I am very pleased with how it all came together and I just really wish that I had had the time to colour it.

From the start of this project, I had an idea for the tone and setting of my animation but I delved into my primary and secondary moodboards to help refine my concept and consolidate it looking at artists like Lucy Sparrow and Laura Sivernt and going into my own local convenience stores to consider layout and backgrounds. I initially struggled with picking which audio I wanted to work with but once I had decided upon that the visuals came easily for the setting and characters but I had to work on refining the story. Initially, my ideas were quite complex and with the cuts between the cashier and customer it would have been quite a confusing scene but with feedback from my tutor I stripped away some of the unnecessary and overly complex details and made it simpler with a clearer focus on my character acting. 

I enjoyed developing my character design skills through my turnarounds and different iterations of my designs so that I could push myself to deviate from my usual style to make more fitting characters. I sought feedback from peers to see which designs they preferred and felt would be most visually appealing for my narrative as well as fitting the voice of my audio. For my backgrounds, I learnt the importance of value sketches and used these to help me develop a colour palette which wouldn’t be too visually overwhelming but also would be fun and quite detailed. 

Animating in ToonBoom was an entirely new experience for me and I enjoyed it more than I expected to, I learnt a lot of new skills both software related and general animation. I feel like I was really able to develop my character acting skills and pushed myself to make my character more expressive and to not shy away from my character acting to be a bit dramatic. 

Overall, I am very pleased with the outcome of my lip sync animation, I am impressed with how I was able to push my character skills and my actual lip sync accuracy as well as how effective my designs were for my short narrative. If given more time, I would have of course loved to be able to colour my animation to see how well my colour palette worked in practise and I would also have liked to refine the arcs in some of the motion especially in the hands.