Individual Animation Production Week

This week I have been animating the clips that were allocated to me by my team. I have three separate clips of audio to animate from and with the help of the animatic, I could work out certain timings for my animation. For context, this is what our animatic looks like:

I am in charge of animating Martha and Tyler:

These are the words that we have edited down in our script which both characters say:

MARTHA Yeh, erm your identity is like your passport when you’re at errr an aeroplane plane place, what’s it called? oh yeah airport yeah! When you’re at one of them you have to scan your tickets and different things and you ID’s so they know who you are TYLER Ermm hu – what are human, I don’t know what human rights are -I am a human? TYLER Football!

For reference here are the three sound clips:

I used these videos to help me work out how to import sound into Toon Boom, they would also help me out later on as a tutorial for Lip Sync: How to Use the Auto Lip-sync in Toon Boom Harmony - tonyteach

How to Import Sound and Add Lip-Sync in Harmony 11 - Toon Boom Animation

I decided that it would be best to start out by animating the body movements with my now fully-bone-rigged characters, and tend to the lip sync later. Using the animatic as a reference I keyed out the main poses. The ToonBoom program automated the frames in between the poses, which left me with a some rather robotic and mechanical looking movements.

But with the help of the graph editor, I was able to add eases into various movements.

The same process was done with the shorter 'Tyler' animation clips:

With this aspect of the animation done, I could then do the lip sync of the characters. With the help of the construction sheet I had made previously for the production bible.

All I had to do was trace over the various mouth shapes, making sure each new drawing was in a separate frame on the same layer. I then deleted all of these initial drawings on the mouth layer and went over to where they had been automatically saved in the 'drawing substitution box', located in the library:

To change the mouth shape I just had to scrub along the time line and then scrub along the substitution box for the next desired mouth shape:

This really proved to be quite an easy process once I figured this all out. It did involve a bit of my own intuition along with a variety of forums and the videos that I linked above, in this blog. Surprisingly, no one else was explaining that it could be this straight forward.

This was a really enlightening and fun part of the process. I was surprised at how quick it took for me to finish the majority of my animation clips within just two days. This left me plenty of time to tweak certain movements and then add in the frame by frame animation over the top of the tweeted animation I had just completed. Inspired by this video: I added 'flare' to my animation and sought after more opportunities to improvise outside of the storyboard. I used the primary opposite colours of the backgrounds to colour the 'flare' animation. This was so that the flare could stand out against the background and the character. Not only was this done by the frame by frame drawings...

...but with the opportunity to utilise the university sponsored access to soundsnap.com. The sound effects I located punctuated certain opportunities for the visual humour within the frame by frame drawings I'd done. (E.g the scanning sound effect used in 'Martha's' clip).

The football crowd sfx also livened up one of 'Tyler's' scenes by giving more depth to the overall soundtrack, rather than just keeping the one-word voice clip that was present within the animatic. I'm pleased at how quickly I was able to produce this section of the process and feel as though I am one step closer to understanding more of what ToonBoom can do. I'm only sad that it is already over and we have to move into post production and documentary editing which can be more tedious. However I am glad that I now feel like I have more pieces of work to add to my showreel. I am more confident in completing the animation for the actual CCC submission as I think that once I have rigged the new characters made from the pupils from my sister's class, in an extra curricular setting, I will be able to produce more animation at a similar speed.