Project Process
The purpose of this project was mainly to learn how to animate with dialogue and practice animation. I don't have much experience animating on paper or doing character animation, but I have done a few traditional walk cycles and loops before. Although I didn't have a solid personal process while working on this, I knew and followed the basic steps of creating an animation.
Pre-Production
Ideating, planning, and preparing for animation
Record Audio
Figuring out what to do for the audio was a bit tricky, but after getting some suggestions from Dr. Veras, I decided to try recording conversations with friends and family. I chose this audio clip of myself that I recorded on a walk with my sister because it seemed expressive enough for animation (and I might have shoved it in people's faces for confirmation...). The original audio clip I set out to animate was 23 seconds long, but because of time limitations, I ended up just animating the first 8 seconds. I also tried editing the audio down in Audacity near the end of the project but decided to leave the audio as is.
Reference
Videos
Before starting the animation, I shot many videos of myself acting out the dialogue, trying different things like starting poses and hand movements. This helped me work out the poses, expressions, and timing for the animation
Character
Design
During the first few weeks, I was trying to figure out what the character would look like. I thought of using an existing character design, but after receiving feedback, I ended up creating my own character design. At first, I thought the character would be a child and designed a kid based on my younger self. However, after some more feedback on how the age mismatch between the audio and character might be weird, I aged up the character. I mainly focused on the face of the character and created a facial expressions sheet that I could reference when animating. I also tried to do some poses, but it was taking too much time, and I needed to start animating...
X-Sheet
I imported my audio file into to Dragonframe to create my exposure (X) sheet. In Dragonframe, I was able to mark the words/sounds on the specific frame they appear and map the appropriate mouth shape to that sound.
Production
Flipping paper back and forth (animating)
Blocking
I started by doing a few rough drawings to figure out where the character will be in the frame and make sure everything fits/feels okay. In my first pass at blocking (shown below), I made the character too big, but because I had only a few drawings, I could quickly fix it before moving on to the rough animation.
Rough
(First Pass)
Once the blocking was finalized, I started animating. For the first pass, I kept the drawings rough and focused on the overall movement and lip sync. I wasn't sure how much to animate for this pass (whether I should draw everything on every other frame or if I could skip a few details and frames).
Tie-Downs
(Second Pass)
After the rough animation was working well enough, I moved on to tie-downs, where I focused on volume to make sure the character wasn't unintentionally morphing and fixed some movements.
