Audio Clip
“Animation is particularly effective when it communicates with movement. But this potential can only be tapped when movement is given a meaningful role.”(Besen, 2008: 16). The audio clip used in this animation was taken from the 11-second club archive called, Crooning frog by Aju Adam (The 11-second club, 2012). The audio consists of one voice humming a tune which I felt would allow me to use the lip-sync animation to a degree but the action of the clip would be guided by the movements rather than taking instruction from the words of an audio clip.
Idea Generation
Storyboard
The storyboard is a key part of the visualisation process in telling the narrative through drawn pictures and to develop the story (Wells, 2006). The narrative centres on a cleaner sweeping a stage as the theatre is closing (dim lighting is used). He gets carried away by the music and allows himself to dance to the tune for a brief moment, until the music comes to a bitter end and he is reminded that he is in fact not the dancer, he is the cleaner (perhaps imagining a life he has dreamed of).
Modelling Set
Creating a convincing environment for the character established the scene and distributed important information into the props of what was happening without the need for dialogue (Beson, 2008). The broom, bucket, and wet floor sign indicate the character is a cleaner, whilst the stage and curtains show the scene is located in a theatre.
Play blast of curtains modelled with n-cloth:
Initial Pose
Lip syncing
To pose the mouth, I photographed a mouth recreating the phoneme shapes to give the impression the character was singing the tune of the audio (Martin, 2020).
Table breaking down mouth movements:
| la | ta | tu | ta | la | tu | ta | tu | ta | la | ta | tu | ta | ta | ta | tu | ta | |||
| open | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | |||||||
| close | x | x | x | x | x | ||||||||||||||
| wide | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | |||||||
| narrow | x | x | x | x | x |
Phoneme shapes:
It’s generally agreed that you should animate body movement first and lip-sync second (Wells, 2006). This helps to focus on making the body communicate what’s being said before you begin lip-syncing.
Reenacting the animation sequence
Side view:
Front view:
Posing
To create the animation, the key positions of the actions were blocked out whilst Maya was able to fill in the movements. Pose to pose animation, as opposed to straight-ahead animation, was used since it offers more control and allows for the in-between work to be defined while ensuring the animation will be hitting its key poses (Besen, 2008).
Lighting
Camera Angles to shoot:
The camera angles take the audience on a ride showing then the beginning, end and everything in between, drawing in on the details of each movement to convey the meaning and create perspective (Beson, 2008)
| Scene | Shot type | Camera angle |
| Sweeping the stage | Establishing shot to set the scene | Extreme wide-angle |
| Wiping forehead | Close up | Medium close up |
| Swings around with the broom | Single | Low camera angle tracking around the swing (dramatic transition) |
| Playing guitar | Single | Side profile while tracking |
| Holding broom as a dance partner | Wide shot | Wide-angle tracking outwards to extreme wide (like the end of the show) |
| Sad expression (end of scene) | Close up | Tight and low close up |
Render
Animation
I made a crucial error in using a locator on the broom rather than parenting the broom to the wrist. This meant that I was unable to reverse the pairing of the objects and animate them separately which was very challenging.
Anticipation was the most difficult of the 12 principles to achieve. I wanted to use a spotlight but the intensity and exposure of it were flooding out the detail of the characters features and so I chose not to do this.
Word count:
References
Besen, E. and Hallett, B. (2008) Animation Unleashed-100 principles every animator, comic book writer, filmmaker, video artist and game developer should know. Michael Wiese Productions. USA.
Martain, G. (2020) Extended Preston Blair phoneme series. Available at: http://www.garycmartin.com/phoneme_examples.html (Accessed: 20th April 2020)
Wells, P. (2006) The fundamentals of animation. AVA Publishing. USA.
The 11-second club (2012) CROONING FROG. Available at: https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/september18/winner (Accessed: 01st February 2020)