Mouth Symbols

Using mouth symbols I already had created on Flash from past projects I used the sound dialogue which Andy gave us and decided to put mouth symbols together. The quality of this video is extremely bad, and you have to wait for the part of the dialogue I animated at around 12 seconds. I've had a lot of practice at this...so I only did this quickly, it's nothing special. I want to move on and try drawing the mouth movements as I am sure that is a lot more challenging because then I can edit the face etc. I have a feeling this is going to be quite difficult. For some reason whenever I export from Flash some images disappear and merge together but you can get the basic idea of what I was trying to achieve here.

Mouth Movements

In my skecthbook I was just drawing out ideas of different mouth movements I could possible use. The top pages have been inspired by porgrammes such as The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park and the bottom page is more basic mouth movements. I have shown a variety as some are using teeth and some are using tongue. When I deign my character for the lip sync I will decide which mouth movements I will use.

Character Emotions

Okay, so to begin with Lip Sync workshops, I began with experimenting with different facial expressions. When doing these I realised that eyebrows are a strong characteristic in the face to show emotion. This is just a small selection and are very basic. Also looking at ho different mouth movements is very helpful as is shows the distortion of the face.

Final Bop Walk Cycle

Here I've just exported the Dragon files at a quicker frame rate so the character walks at a normal pace.

Bop Walk Cycle

So this is the character walk I have created, I am very proud of this however there are a few things I would like to change if I had the time but this is going to be my final walk cycle, as I need to move onto my lip sync. As you can see there is a pause when the front arm reaches it's highest swinging point, however I like this in a way as it adds more weight. The back arm isn't as fluid as I'd like it to be as it's a bit jerky, but it's not too bad. I really like the dip I managed to get of the whole body but if I was to do it again I would over exaggerate it as I think it's possibly a bit too subtle. I would also make the body lean back as it dips, I did want to do this on this animation but I got very confused with the keyframes and whereabout its should lean. The contact the feet have with the floor I personally think are fine and shows the weight of the body, I also really like how the back foot slows down when it's being brought forward because that is the effect I wanted to create. It shows how the speed of someone bopping changes throughout compared to a normal walk. Overall I think I did this walk cycle really well from scratch.

Bop Walk Cycle Key Frames

Okay so after taking references from my video I captured, I paused it every 5-ish frames on Quicktime. this allowed me to draw the still image on to Animation paper. I found this really difficult to do as I had no idea if the animation was going to flow properly. The walk is basically a bop. So the character will take one dipping step and then a normal one. To be honest it's really hard to visualize with only the keyframes and I exported this sequence way too fast from Dragon. I've decided to definitely go ahead with the inbetweens even though the keyframes are very wary.

Bop Walk Cycle

For my next animation I wanted to practice more walks so I decided to create one with more personality. I couldn't find any keyframes on the internet to use or help me create the walk that I had in mind so I decided to use a reference video which I filmed of myself. Here I am just walking across the screen, over exaggerating a bop so I can pick out keyframes, so I can convert to an animation. Hopefully this will work because I hope it'll create a unique walk that nobody else will have.