I animated Joey, did the backgrounds and compiled mine and Matias' work together, and this was the end result.
I finished doing the animation for the other shot that Joey is in. The only line here is a bear roar, but still, needs mouth movements synced to it. One thing that I noticed animating this, is that most of the time, you can get away with a surprisingly small amount of animation. Most of the body animation here is the three main poses with varying amounts of squash and stretch to give the impression of movement, and it seems to work pretty well. There's almost no sort of real in-betweens.
I had to put the front right paw on a separate layer so that it'd be in front of Joey's head at the start of the shot, which posed an interesting issue about trying to make it stay in line with the movement of the rest of the body. But at the same time, the slight difference in movement on the leg seems to have a little bit of a stabilising effect on the character motion as a whole. Also, originally, he was going to end the shot with his head held up, but I realised that Joey's head pops up into shot in the other lip syncing moment, so his head had to come back down at the end of this one in order for it to make sense narratively. I've finished animating Joey in the longest shot of the storyboard that we've put together. I've also put together a short video showing the steps from initial storyboard to the finished character animation (background has not been done so far). I'm gonna be working with Matias Greenwood on the two character lip sync exercise. I'm gonna be using my bear character Joey, and he's gonna be using his old rat character, Remus.
We had a couple drafts of the script in mind: Initial Idea: Remus - Aaah! A bear! Run for your lives! [slowly edges away on walking stick] Joey - Well that's a bit rude. Editted Idea: [Remus accidentally hits Joey with walking stick] Remus - Aaah! A bear! Kill it! Joey - Well excuse you. [flicks Remus away] Final Idea: [Remus accidentally hits Joey with walking stick] Joey - AAAH! Remus - Aaah! It's a bear! Joey - Aaah! Where? Oh, wait, right. [pause] Joey - Can you stop hitting me? Remus - Die foul beast! Super Rough Thumbnail Storyboard: We did a workshop on working in Flash. I say workshop. It was kind of a "they told us what to do and let us get on with it" type thing. But still, I got it all done: - Shapes moving around with varying frame rates and with manual easing. - Shape moving with tween easing, interacting with another object. - Walk cycle - Lip syncing using symbols I don't start the Flash exercise until next week, but I've already started doodling up some lip sync charts for my characters. I'm thinking of maybe making some Flash rigs of my characters, and having a go at some of the more complicated symbol animation.
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