Just when I thought it was becoming manageable, the level of difficulty just got raised; the project we are working towards in this unit is a lip-synced piece, put together with the 11 second club, a fine website offering the public a chance to submit work and to gain valuable insights into animating to a monthly chosen piece of audio funnily enough, 11 seconds long. So far this week I’ve been delving into Alex’s excellent tuition videos, understanding accents, where to place the keyposes and how to break down the audio timing.
The first element is to listen to the audio and underline the accents and describe the volume/pitch of the audio. The audio that I’ve chosen fits well, I think, with the rig I’d been wanting to explore. It’s an Edward Snowden interview where he’s explaining the nature of mobile phone surveillance. My character who is a kind of medieval ogre, will be saying this-
The idea being that he’s mightily confused by this technology, due to him preceding it by 500 years or so. Here’s the breakdown of the audio, highlighting the timings.
And then the corresponding thumbs-
After that I spent the rest of the day putting together the keyposes, expressions and some of the breakdowns.
Knowing that I’d be spending today working out the majority of the poses and timings, I’d spent a few hours on Friday and Sat morning crafting the phonetic shapes of his mouth and saving them into Studio Library, that way when I’d done the posing it would be a more satisfying task to plop the shapes into position, synced with the audio. I know, it’ll be far more difficult that that, but creating the shapes first felt like I was more than 50% there, good psychology. Here’s the shapes-
