Speech Clips
Below are three clips I have chosen based on their audio. I will later choose one to be used for my final animation of the rig and although the originals posed here may not be the best quality I will either find better versions or record over them with my own voice if I am unable to.
The first sound clip I chose actually comes from a popular cartoon; Pokemon. It is the most famous lines excluding the original opening and would require me to use two separate models, with the possibility of a third one since the last character (Meowth) has a line at the very end. I want to use this clip simply because how interesting it'd be to have a video clip with already remade movements and to try and create a completely new set of them that still go with the lines and preferably over exaggerate the entire scene even more. Finding new models that aren't simply copies of Eleven (The rig I have used previously) won't be too hard since I'll look at the same website where I found Eleven and get similar looking to each other characters that look like they could belong in the same universe together, preferably with same art style or created but the same creator.
The second clip I chose a man speaking really fast because I found it not only to have huge comedic potential with all the fast mouth movements but also all the hand actions I could add later that would exaggerate the situation further. Although the text isn't funny in itself it is always possible to make it seem inappropriately funny, such as choosing a rig that looks like the man in the video or a person of power and make the entire animation entering around politics, where I have the main character look similarly to a dictator and deliver this speech to his people. It would be an interesting experience to make the environment look like something shown on TV, with him sitting at a table or standing atop a crowded arena. The hardest parts would be getting the mouth movements to fit as well as editing the video in the end to look black and white and have small static go through it.
The third clip I took into consideration is the shortest case Judge Judy had to deal with on TV. Since it is about 20 seconds long it perfectly fits the time frame for how long my animation/rig should be as well as gives me the chance to animated more than just one character. I will have to find at least three rigs on the internet that look like they belong in the same universe and have similar art style which might be a challenge since it's very difficult to see two different artists do the same sort of style. I think rigging characters to this scene would prove to be interesting an give me many creative opportunities where I can change the scenario to a family fight or a court one same as on the video. I could record myself over the audio with a friend to bring up the quality and also film an exaggerated version of this event which I would take as a guide to how to make my final rig.
This video presents the 12 principles of animation, throughout my unit and course. These rules are important to follow when considering an animation because they bring life into what you're projecting on the screen.
-Squash and Stretch
-Anticipation
-Staging
-Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
-Follow Through and Overlapping Action
-Ease In and Ease Out
-Arc
-Secondary Action
-Timing
-Exaggeration
-Solid Drawing
-Appeal
The fourth and final sound clip I found on Youtube I chose to look at because of the fun subject of the video and it's clear sound, which the other three videos don't have. The past videos were all taken out of shows which were quite old and so I'd have to also re-record most of the audio if I were to use them. This video on the other hand was recorded and animated this year. Since most of the clip doesn't have a character animation; only the situations animated, I have the free range of animating whatever comes to my mind as to what the rigs would act like when saying those words. I will be able to widely imagine without being influenced by the original clip. There aren't many problems with this clips like with the others except for having to find three separate rigs and animating them to talk to one another which I think would be fun to do since I'll get to learn more about animating interactions between characters. It is also much longer than the other clips but I can cut it down and only use parts I found most interesting or fun.
Bouncing Ball Animation
Rigging And Anticipation
Final Idea+Story Board
12 Principles of Animation
Character Animation in Movies
Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd Films
Door Opening Animation Mentor
The first animation I took a look at was a Monster's Inc short clip. A lot of emphasis is given to the rigs of the two present characters as both their limbs and expressions have very fluid motions. As Dream Works usually does, the animation is targeted to all audience types however mainly children. Because of this the animation of the characters has to be visually pleasing however at the top of its quality with realistic movements achieved through means such as rotoscoping or looking at live clip of someone acting out the actions and trying to copy them with the animation. The characters are exaggerated,to appeal to children, some extend and the animation follows most principles.
Similarly to Monster's Inc, Despicable me shot has very well rendered scenes with realistic lighting and shadows at work. The work is again targeted mainly towards children, having very playful and colourful character designs, especially the minions, which use a lot of the animation principles to make them more appealing. Both movies however don't exaggerate their characters hugely, the style simply not allowing things like eye-popping scenes to occur or scenes where a character who runs is elongated to exaggerate their action.
Anticipation/Action/Reaction
Eleven Rig And Franklin
At first we were advised to work with an Eleven Rig which we got from the 11 seconds club website. As seen on the test run, test rig, it had a couple of problems with made it impossible for me to work correctly with the model. The model we were supposed to use had errors come up constantly as well as its head kept getting separated from the rest of its body, forcing my to move it as it's separate entity after making one key frame.
Not being a fan of the model and its rather simple features I chose to instead download a different rig and go through this unit using them. The rig I chose instead was the Franklin rig that I found on the following two websites and downloaded;
https://www.artella.com/#/home
http://animationapprentice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/meet-franklin.html
To begin working on my idea, I firstly imported the audio file after downloading it off youtube. I did this simple by dragging the audio from my desktop to the time bar in Maya. To turn on the eye rig I had to go into the Channel Box and turn on its controls as well as I turned off the Face UI and Mustache.
The two clips above showcase slap stick humour used back in the day in both films with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, who during their golden times were famous actors. We had to look into these two films to get ideas into how our character should be able to move to convey their emotions more through their actions rather than words in case our rigged models wasn't rigged to move its mouth as much as we would like. Looking into these two videos gave me an insight at slap stick humour which could come in handy when making my final animation so that it'd look much more appealing to all audience.
I looked at a couple online drawn charts that help with facial animation since phonemes are difficult to animate without references. This one shows underneath which letters each face corresponds to.
This is another chart I used to help me alongside the live action of the audio. This chart has many expressions which are more exaggerated than a live recording can be of the saying which often also applies to animation since it tends to rely on exaggeration which to a certain point I wish to achieve with mine.
Following the animation rules of Anticipation, Action and Reaction we had to animate our model to look at something and show his reacting to that. Since I found Franklin much more advanced and fun to use than Eleven I used him. Having the advantage of being able to move his body in more advanced poses, his fingers and body contortion being perfectly rigged. As seen above I created the simple and quite simple animation of making him gasp.
In this shot we were able to work with our rigs entire body, and I decided to also rig his legs to create a short walking animation up to the weight before he finally picks it up. Although the file is quite small I also have to add that I added small blinking and expression changes to make the viewing more entertaining and to test myself to see whether I could do it. The most fun part of doing this action was playing around with his hand and making sure they look natural.
Pocoyo unlike the previous two animations doesn't use realistic animation for its characters and often times stretches them beyond reasonable ways, exaggerating greatly their movement through timing and appeal; resulting in its characters looking as if they were all made out of stretchable clay. This makes the characters more likable and appealing to younger audience with wild animation and who find such visuals funny or pleasing to the eye. The shading as well as character designs and backgrounds are much simpler as the company undoubtedly has a smaller budget for each episode than Pixar or Dreamworks would have for a full length feature.
Character Animation
Similarly to our first year animation project, here I looked at the animations of a bouncing ball, creating a couple of my own and showing the process of its creating while I was at it. Since I wanted to challenge myself I used simple cubes to create the stairs model and made the ball bounce down them using key frames and looking at different angles to make sure it didn't look off and didn't go through the stairs at any point which would ruin the animation.
Here is a final video I created that showcases three different ball types by their weight. The first one is supposed to show a heavy ball, the second a bouncy ball and the third a balloon that never really hits the floor. It was interesting to do this sort of animation and have to make sure each ball varied in appearance of weight since it'll undoubtedly come in handy when animating characters.
I imported the model from MudBox into Maya of a human figure then tried rigging anticipation and reaction with it with a simple ball. As seen on the last two videos above; the tests went really well. It took a couple tries to get my character to throw the ball, especially since in between key frames it appeared to move through his hand. I fixed this problem by making more frames in between and moving the ball into his hand between each one so it'd look smoother and more accurate. To challenge myself I also created a tennis rocket in Maya and animated it to hit the ball coming towards it however I admit the timing is slightly off once it hits it.
Joy
Anger
Despair
Our next task was to present the rig we chose showing key emotions through a simple render or screenshot. The first emotion I chose to portray was anger. whenever human beings feel attacked or deceived, they lash out in anger. The poses for this emotion are quite simple to understand. Our bodies are directed at the attacker, standing with knees slightly bent as well as our back, giving the others a bigger and wider perception of us as if we were the only thing that is supposed to be in center of attention. In the poses I've researched up through google, in animation, 3D models and live photograph, all characters point their fingers and have their other hand either at the back or close to their side, showing irritation.
On the left you can see my interpretation of these poses through my own screenshot of an angry Franklin model. Taking inspiration from them all I made sure his expression showed anger as well as his stance. His eyebrows arch down in the middle of the face and then outwards on the outsides. His eyelids are slightly slanted and his mouth is wide open in a grimace. His cheekbones, similarly to when someone is smiling, are moved upwards to give more volume to his face. I also twisted his torso in an attempt to give the pose more character.
Another animation I researched to look in for slap stick humour were two door animations that were up on a website called Anmation Mentor. Both present to the audience a very clear message of a locked door through no words but actions of the main characters. I wish to show this type of understanding in my animations also however mine will also have my character speak. It will be hard combining the two practices since both their words and movements will have to present a clear message of their mood.
The next emotion I have looked into was sorrow/despair. It was one of the more simple emotions to usually portray for animators because when a character feels uneasy or sad they tend to curl up into a ball or fall onto their knees, hiding their face by either looking down, putting their hands over it or letting their hair fall over it. Overall what I gained from this research is understanding that whenever a character feels despair they feel small and don't want to be seen. I took a spin on this is with my Franklin model, still wishing to show the character's face although he was feeling despair.
On the left you can see my screenshot of Franklin doing the despair pose. He is looking at the ground with his eyelids being very slanted. This is very common trope among characters who are about to cry and are holding back the tears. His eyebrows are also moved to show sorrow and mouth is in a grimace. Unlike in anger the grimace is much smaller and eyebrows have a dent in the middle and go downwards at the outsides. His back is bent and pose is overall made to make his appear small like in the reference images.
The final emotion I researched into was happiness. It was the hardest emotion to research because people tend to portray it in their own ways and usually only through facial expressions father than body positions. Nonetheless I found a couple images of exaggerated happiness that I used as visual references for my work. Looking through these poses I noticed an obvious similarity of a very open body language, their arms being outstretched and huge smiles being evident on their faces. All of this helped me create the final render. For expression I mostly took reference off the animated screenshot because of how easily duplicate it was as well as human faces have a harder time showing clear emotions.
On the left you can see my final screenshot of the pose I made Franklin take. His arms were easy to rig out since they had to be simply outstretched although at times they'd twist at strage angles. His legs are slightly spread out and his eyebrows are done upwards to better convey his emotion.I moved his cheekbones up after making his smile to make his expression more realistic and less strange. Overall I am quite please with how all the expressions turned out.
My final pick was to choose the team rocket motto, my first initial clip idea. I searched up live action version of the motto and chose the one above to take a look at since I knew looking at the people's lip movement would help me while making the model of Franklin say it also and that by doing this I could make it look as natural and realistic as possible, in oppose to the animated version where the mouth movements are too simple to copy as their mouths just open and close repeatedly in tune with the audio; I wanted to go a step further than that and instead looked into this clip for help.
I then went ahead and made a simple storyboard portraying what I want to achieve with my final video, Although I made it out of a combination of simple sketches, in my opinion in shows very well how everything should play out. I knew from the moment I chose this video to cover with my rigged animation, that I simply won't have enough time to do all 11 lines of the motto or that I will rig all three characters. So taking inspiration from the slapstick videos I searched up, I came up with a funny twist on the entire speech with a funny twist of an ending to it all. I didn't want to just cover the motto and make it exact to the cartoon; I wanted to take an unexpected twist with it which I hope to convey clearly through my final product. The ending with the speech coming out of a TV or a radio would be fantastic since it'd also allow me to show the character interact with an object placed in the scene and since he falls over in one of the scenes, it'll allow me to play with gravity and camera movement.
After importing the audio file and looking into phonemes I started slowly animating my rig of Franklin. As seen in the first video I started off by creating his mouth movements for the first line of the motto. I then (as shown on the second video I uploaded) began testing body language that would go with the lyrics as well as my story board, admittedly I had a lot of difficulty moving his hand. Finding this way of doing things rather difficult I instead started to animate both the body and mouth motions at the same time, resulting in the third video shown above where I managed to animate two lines of the motto.
I modelled a radio as seen on the image above which will be used as a sort of prop during the animation process similarly to how I showed a television on my sketch sheet, I changed that into a radio since I wasn't sure how I would input the film into the TV, with a radio the sound coming from it will be implied but it'll be an easy enough implications for most to understand.
This unit circled around the ideas of using rigs we can find online (preferably Eleven) to create a short 4-20 second animation. This animation should include simple and complex techniques we learn throughout the unit such as the principles an animation has to follow and
Evaluation
I continued to animate the motto and by the end of finishing the third line noticed I had no knowledge of how gravity would work with a backwards fall. Because of this I searched up on google an image I could use for the fall scene and as seen on the right, found one that suited perfectly what I had in mind. The image helped me see how the body would look and how it'd bend during such a fall and which limbs would be more affected by the gravity and which would not be. I then proceeded to animate the character movement according to my plan and sketches. The video above shows my progress with three lines of dialogue done.
Progress
Above this text is a video of the fall that I animated soon after finding the image depicting a falling man. the pose is heavily based off of his with some added elements. It proved to be quite hard to animate such a complex action since I haven't tried anything similar before, except for gravity play when I made the Franklin model pick up a weight. Above are also two pictures of Franklin when I started experiencing bugs in with my rig of him. It was hard finding the right key frame at which the bug occurred however after finding it I had no problems getting rid of it and moved on with my project.
These are my two final clips of animation that I will later have to put together, they are in order as well as showcase the tradition from the scenes which won't be as perfectly fluid as I would have hoped it'd be but nonetheless will link the two together without causing the audio to sound off in any way. I am quite happy with how the two turned out as they present my idea that I beforehand sketched out and follow through with it perfectly. As seen on the third screenshot I have linked the two using a program called IMovie. I did not use premiere pro for this unit because it was not necessary to use an advanced program for a simple link between two videos.
Final Video
Here is the final video I got from putting my final two clips together. In my opinion it portrays perfectly the transitions from each sketch I made while working on the story for the clip; in which it turns out the character is only mimicking the voice acting and not actually saying it, later on falling and revealing the fact to the audience by suddenly stopping his over dramatic act and hitting the radio which plays the voices out. The other hint to this fact is that Franklin uses his hand instead of mouth for the female parts of the motto.
The theme of our project was the create a short 4-20 second video using a pre-existing rig and audio, putting the two together as well as using the rig's mouth and body actions to make a believable scene; personally I enjoyed the initial theme. My favourite parts of this project had to definitely be planning and sketching out the story board since it was a huge creative outlet for me. A new technique me and my fellow students experienced was rigging models and their features to a completely new level, beyond what our other units allowed. A technique I would like to develop further would have to definitely be the putting audio in my units and working along with it to create my final piece.Throughout the project we researched the 12 principles of animation which helped greatly when animation the character movement and finding out how to make them more/less likable and relatable. Using the secondary action was my favourite. I feel like the most successful part of my project was rigging the mouth motions since they looked quite accurate to how they're supposed to look, The only problems I encountered throughout my project were occasional rig breakthroughs where Franklin's facial expressions somehow got stuck and I had to search frame by frame where the problem occurred, other than that no problems arrived. If I had the chance to do this project again I would definitely use two rigs for the soundtrack since for most people it wasn't obvious what happened through Franklin's actions alone, leaving confusion.