Here’s all the sketchbook planning I did for Week 1′s assignment. This week’s lecture was conducted by the lovely Jason Schleifer, who is now Head of Character Animation at Dreamworks (a website that my ancient PC does not enjoy visiting!). Regarding the lecture itself… let’s just say I was impressed.
First up, we’ve got the phonetic break-down of the dialogue:
Or rather, the dialogue written according what what mouth shapes are needed to make the sound. For example, you tend not to write things like ‘W’ (as in “what’s the big idea?”) – you actually make the same mouth shape when saying ‘w’ as you do if you said ‘ooo’. It adds an additional layer of complexity/thinking than just writing out the line using phonetics.
I’ve highlighted the most important sounds, these are the ones that I have to hit if I want the dialogue to read clearly, and also made a note of where I think there will be a pretty significant change in mouth shape over a very short amount of time (anywhere there’s a diphthong, for example).
Now it’s time for some terrible drawings!
Amazing, right? I can only apologise! It’s just a basic idea of what expressions I wanted to use over the course of the line. As long as it conveys the emotion, it doesn’t really matter how good (or in this case, bad) the drawings are. As you’ll see, I’ve actually already deviated from this slightly in my blocking phase.
Mario suggested this quick way of nailing down some basic jaw rotations – take the dialogue line and think about how open the mouth will need to be at various points and sounds.
Man, that new Animation Mentor logo thing is really annoying! Anyway, here’s my first pass of the facial animation for this shot – I’ve just tried to block in the main phoneme shapes and expressions. I know the body still requires loads of work – I haven’t touched any of that since last term, mostly because I moved house yet again this week, so I wanted to dedicated the limited time I had to just concentrating on the face. I’ve also included a ‘head cam’ shot so you can take a look at the facial animation without everything else to distract ;)
The curves for the facial animation are all clamped; I haven’t done any refining of those nor have I done anything with the tongue, cheeks or nose yet as I wanted to make sure the basic sound shapes are reading properly first. There’s also almost no eye animation at the moment (I think it works reasonably well already?) and there’s some basic blinking going on.
Thanks for reading! As always questions, comments or critiques are more than welcome!
My mentor in terms 5 and 6 was really keen on thinking about visiemes over phonemes – which is to say, the visual shapes that the mouth adopts over breaking things down into the different sounds, which can cause the mouth to look a little chattery – doing too much tends to be an issue when you’re working on lip sync.
He also said, when you’re blocking the jaw, just think about it in terms of open/closed and narrow/wide – so the ooo sound is closed and narrow, the eee sound is closed and wide. That’ll get you 90% of the way there and you can then build the correct face shape on top of that.
That said, I still suck at lip sync, so consider this passed-on knowledge rather than golden :D
Thanks for replying Chris. Yeah you’re right, it is more important to think about the shape rather than the sounds specifically. Hopefully my planning informed that in my work.
As for blocking the jaw, I only used my planning as a very rough guide. Not sure about just thinking about it in terms of open/closed and wide/narrow is quite enough information to make sure you’re hitting the right sounds early on. I’d rather get the key shapes in there early.
Also, it might mean that you put a little more contrast and asymmetry into your face shapes if you make each one “bespoke”, rather than relying solely on the jaw.
I’ll get onto post my mentor’s critique notes in a bit!