Character Animation Projects - Lip Sync

Fred rig downloaded from animationbuffet.blogspot.com.

This was my final project for Character Animation. I am rather proud of this one, I think the character rig I choose is very befitting of Nathan Lane's voice. The audio clip I choose to animated is from one of my favorite movies Birdcage! However, I would like to make one grievance, only myself and two others in the class the day we presented audio clips we'd like to use, knew the movie Birdcage. SO DISAPPOINTING!!!! These young kids...tisk, tisk!

I first shot a reference video of my self acting out the scene. I am no actor, my acting is embarrassing, but the world can feel free to have a good laugh at my expense and watch my reference video below. (My dog Oskar got in the way a couple of times, he wanted to be apart of the process!)

  

Using my reference I extenuated some of my acting bits that were much too stiff to give the character, well, a little more character. I set key poses for the body mechanics and then moved on to secondary poses, and splining. Once the body felt like it was a pretty solid animation, I moved on to set the facial expressions. The character mostly is angry but he has a few small moments he needed to be shocked or sad. With the expression on the face in the proper place it was finally time to move the mouth to sync to the audio. This is a pretty hard process, plus you have to make some pretty embarrassing faces while looking into a mirror to analyze what shape your mouth makes for certain sounds. For instance, when someone says the word "that" they may not even realize that their tongue is sticking out between their teeth to make the "th" sound. It was a tricky process, but I think I was pretty successful at my first attempt at a lip sync. 

Character Animation Projects - Pose to Pose

This was my first project in Character Animation this semester. We were to animate a character do a step and a jump across a few objects. I shot reference to get a better view of what the body mechanics should look like. The process for animating this was first to set Key Poses, these poses established when the character made contact with the ground or was up in the air. Key poses are the poses that make the movement the most convincing. Once those poses were set I did a second pass which is referred to as Secondary Poses, these poses are what establish a smoother movement in the animation. The next set was a Splinning pass, this is more refinement of the animation with in the graph editor of Maya. A final pass of Polish to make sure all of the curves in the graph editor were creating the proper time within the animation.

The Feeder - Animation Pass

This is a very rough sketch of the entire animation, no worries about color, that will all change. I will have to go back through all of these frames and do the final drawings and color. Some of the timing will be increase when the animation is put together in AfterEffects.

We are making headway!!!

The Feeder (update)

Things are starting to happen....

The Feeder

This Semester in Advanced Raster we were assigned to create a project for the Adobe Challenge. There were many categories to choose from, Laura Osteen, my partner on this project choose to create an animation. We will utilize each of our skill sets to the fullest to complete this piece. I will be focused on the animation of the main characters using Adobe Photoshop and Flash. Laura will be modeling a 3D background in Maya that we will later put into Adobe AfterEffects to compile all of our elements together to tell our story. 'The Feeder' is a cute story about a dog that befriends a group of friendly birds at a bird feeder.

The Animation above is the rough storyboard for this animation that we will be using at a guide to create our final animation.

Lucky 7's - A Stop-Motion Animation

Lucky 7's from Julie_Woodburn on Vimeo.

It's finally done!!!! This was certainly a struggle project. I dived in enthusiastically and left battered and bruised. I had many issues with my lighting sources. I struggled to set them up to give the green background even light as to remove it later. Many shadows were cast which created an inconsistent color, problematic for keying out in post. My problems didn't stop at shadows, heat from the lights caused the Plasticine to melt, making it very difficult to animate the characters in the scene. (Side bar; the lights also melted the blinds in my apartment and that's no good!)

Once finished with animating all of the clay parts the post production became arduous. I created a few additional effects to tell the story. Morty, the male character, after suffering a heart attack is enveloped in coins over his dead body. It was a meticulous process to image by image animate coins to cover him. I edited over a hundred images to add the coins into the scene. This was done using Photoshop. All of the images, I then imported into Adobe Aftereffects and cut together and keyed out the green backdrop to create a white backdrop. 

I found sound effects using some free royalty free services, www.freesound.org and www.bensound.com. Using my final sequence from Aftereffects, I imported it into Adobe Premier to add the sound and music.

Finally, done.

I learned a lot. I tested my patience, A LOT! In the end, I think it was worth it and although the look of the animation isn't up to my expectation, it still looks pretty darn good for having never attempted this type of animation before. I would be remiss to not thank the professors at ETSU who helped guide me to create this, so, THANK YOU, Jonathan Hounshell and James, Livingston. Also, I received helpful advice from my fellow classmates of the New Media Foundations Class, Karahann Kiser and Laura Osteen. This was an interesting project to tackle but quite rewarding in the end.

Just don't ask me to do a stop-motion for like, another 5 years or so.

Drawing Final

This is my final for my Graduate Drawing course with Professor Andrew Ross. I decided to get a little political and after some recent comments made by the Trumpster, it couldn't be any more relevant. I won't get a soap box, but it's absolutely distasteful and disgraceful many of the things Donald Trump has been saying. Jesus would most certainly be saying "DaFaq?" to all of this hullabaloo.