Back in December, I was wanting to work on a lipsynch before I really got into my Workshop 4 class for iAnimate which goes over lipsynchs and facial animation. I thought I would treat this as a nice warm up to work out a few kinks so that I could focus better once I really got into the workshop.
The piece of dialogue I chose is from 30 Rock, and I found it ironically relevant to myself, being at the beginning of my animation career, constantly throwing out resumes and applications and slugging through not so appealing jobs to get by in the mean time. The piece also stood out to me as having a strong change of mood, with a sharp comedic effect. With this in mind, I set about my work in quite high spirits.
Without the guidance of a mentor, I began the best I could and that was with the knowledge I already had in body mechanics. The characters I selected for this were simple blobs (I chose to do this so that more focus would be in the face as opposed to anywhere else) and the acting given to me from 30 Rock was so great to me that I decided to transcribe that (Kenneth's awkwardness really is quite great). Unfortunately, facial animation is whole other beast from body mechanics and while I had the body moving quite well by focusing on the contacts and passing poses, it didn't quite transcribe as well in the face. It was overloaded and required a lot of fine tuning, too much fine tuning for the stage of the animation that I was at.
With that being said however, it really went off without a hitch. I didn't have any major hiccups or pops, and everything went pretty smoothly. My biggest problems were in getting it to be appealing as possible, and to read as clearly as possible.
After reaching my polish stage, I decided to look up some tutorials on facial animation and lipsynch to see if there was anything I could use to further what I already had. And of course there was, I wish I had looked at it before I began, it would have saved me quite a bit of time. My biggest problem is that I progressed with straight-ahead animation through the lipsynch, trying to match each pose as he hit each syllable and mouth shape. what I found that I should have done however was to block in the mouth with open/close and wide/narrow shapes and then from there further refine. I also later came to realize, that every action in the face (like with the body) affects the other parts, because they are all connected. I had an odd sense of disconnect for a while, because when my character would blink, nothing else would move, once I started to move the brows and scrunch the cheeks, I could see the life come into my characters.
The other area I learned a lot in was that as opposed to the body, the face tends to hold it's forms with emotions quite statically for significant amounts of time. An entire piece may only have two or maybe three different "faces" depending on the emotional progress of the character. I had my face constantly moving, and it created a floating effect, something that just wasn't quite right. Once I calmed the face down, the emotions read clearer and became much more effective. I also towards the end began to push my exaggeration. Exaggeration is another area I have struggled on in the past, but here I let go of my reservations and just pushed my open mouths wider, squinted my eyes more, and just really tried to hit the extremes harder and I can say it's a wonderful difference to see.
I'm quite happy with my piece, I'm not as satisfied with the antennae and secondary action there, the rig isn't built to easily animate those, but that really doesn't excuse my general inexperience with items such as that. My next go around with lip synch will be better, I learned a lot from this piece, and about my workflow, and am quite excited to begin my 4th workshop with iAnimate next week.
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