#anisound

How can I repair a damaged camera screen?

In this project as well as learning new a new software, I’ve learnt some of the principles and processes of what it takes to match animation with sound. And I’ve learnt through utilising audio programs and dope sheets to identify phonemes the process of animating lip sync becomes more streamlined. With the two different tasks in this project I took very different approaches. With the first task my focus was on learning the software and seeing how far it can be pushed to try identify if it’s something I’d like to use in future projects which it seems it is. With the second task my focus was on timing and emphasising the key words by changing more than just the mouth shapes on the face, for example also moving the jaw. I feel that in both tasks I was successful in achieving my own aims as well as the brief. However, that being said I think I could have done better by experimenting in my own time more alongside a broader range of research. So if I were to do this again I would I try develop my ideas more through iteration and experimentation. Overall, I’d say that this project went well and has given me a lot to work with in future projects with the main take away that can be applied to any project and any discipline is how visuals can be used to emphasise a sound and vice versa.

I think whilst using a puppet rig to animate lip sync is a lot more streamlined than frame by frame, the lack of freedom to completely change the face at will limits the potential of this process. The freedom to draw the face completely different and react to the emotions of the speech makes me want to explore a similar task but with frame by frame animation as I feel that it has the potential to lead to a better performance. Although this method definitely has it’s place, perhaps with projects with tighter deadlines. 

The finished version. I think that with all the features working together it does indeed begin to emphasise some of the speech like the f in family. So overall, I achieved what I set out to experiment with and I think that it’s fairly successful with okay timing and mouth shapes but I think that the nose may be the weakest point. I should have tested it more than I did but I think it was the right call to make it more subtle, I just think that it might be better to go even further in that direction. 

With the nose I think that it can work but needs to be less extreme because at the moment it draws attention whereas it should be used to amplify certain parts of the audio.

It’s starting to look like a lot more natural but I need to work on some of the timings and add some inbetweens to make the eye darts less sudden. I’m also going to try experiment with animating the nose.

Adding the jaw seemed to have the right effect. It also helped emphasise the beats of the speech. Next step is to animate the other facial features to avoid the Family Guy stare and turn this into a performance rather than a moving image.

First step of animating the mouth working from the dope sheet I did. At this point I think that most of the timing seems to work well with the mouth shapes, a little refinement is needed but I want to add the jaw to see how that impacts the piece.