Part 1 , Part 3 , Part 4

StoryBoards

In class, we did a short exercise creating the storyboard / Thumbnails for the first page of the Monsters Inc. script.

Here is my result...

Feedback:

In general I got good opinions, only in page 3, middle box 2nd line, ''It's the only time we see the character from behind, and the camera angle crosses the line'' and gave me a good link about the term and how to prevent it. Something that I will definitely consider in the future.

Extra:

On Valentine's Day Don Chibi gave me the book '' Steven Universe: Art & Origins '' by Chris McDonnell, Rebecca Sugar & Genndy Tartakovsky. BEAUTIFUL and super recommended, not only for its detailed process in creating the show, but if you are like me and you LOVE the show is mega rewarding to read. You can have a quick look in this video.

AND NOW...

I’m going to introduce you to the assets I’ll use in my final project, for now these are ideas that I have been working on:

DRUNK WALKING CYCLE

During a holiday with Don Chibi in 2019, we went to one of my Favourite places in Honduras, Amapala, more specific we visited “La Isla del Tigre“ an island with a conical basaltic stratovolcano. In those magnificent beaches we loved to see my inspiration for this project: a drunk man walking in the beach, somehow drinking sea water from a beer bottle.

Ah! The memories!

So for this drunk walking cycle I’ll use Zhu Baijie, a maya rig by TruongCgArtist, concept art by Tuan Nguyen  and Finalizing Model & Texture by Leo Nguyen.

You can have a look of their preview video here.

I have to say, so far this was the most difficult model to find, since I wanted a rig with tummy, but without being a character with a sphere instead of a maleable stomach.

3 HIT COMBAT

For this part of the project we were given the option to choose between create a 3 hit combat or a character lifting an object, excited I decided to go with combat and record Don Chibi doing Kung Fu moves over and over and over.

For this rig, I found in a different website ANOTHER rig from TruongCgArtist, called Wukong, concept by Tuan Nguyen  and Textures by Leo Nguye.

Aaaand here’s their preview video!

For the third part of the project I still haven’t choose my rigs, but for now I’ll let you with...

LIST OF WEBSITES FOR 3D ASSETS.

Something that can be helpful for more than one person.

• CGtrader
• Open3Dmodel
• TurboSquid
• Sketchfab
• Renderhub
• HighEnd3d
• CreateCG
• Gumroad
• Textures (mostly textures, but also some 3d Objects)
• 3Dtextures.me (more realistic textures)
• GlobePlants (only high quality plants models, nothing free though!)
• and of course, here in Art Station!

If I find any other website I’ll add it to the list!

Week 7: How to create a performance

During this week I have been walking, eating and breathing principles of the animation, I have gone to the park and I begin to fill my sketchbook with walking key poses (when I improve them I will post them here)

Until then I would like to incorporate the annotations I made during the lecture with ... d r u m s ... ED HOOKS!

ED HOOKS IN THE HOUSE

Ed is a MASTER, actor recognized for his techniques, He has created a guide for actors AND animators, in this case highlighting his book '' Acting for Animators'' which I am eager to get my hands on :) 

Thanks for the gift, bro!

These were quick notes, so if I misunderstand something bear with me jajaja

In animation, your character is an ACTOR, not a puppet. If I touch your cheek you are going to have a reaction.

Acting is BEHAVING BELIEVABLY in pretend circunstances for a Theatrical Purpose.

A lot of people would say your character needs to see... real, but nobody cares about regular reality, that's boring. Humans are the only ones who can pretend, animals can't. However this ability only begins to manifest on children between 4-5 years old, not younger.

We have to study humans like we are a martian, Why would humans like to walk into a room with a big screen and sit watching images for two hours? Why do some decorate their bodies with pictures? Why do they change their voices when they speak to animals? Oh! the mysteries!

EMOTION leads to ACTION-- You should be able to freeze your character and know: action, obstacle and objective.

In reality we think CONFLICT as something bad, but in acting that can change, you can have a conflict about choosing an ice cream flavour.

Your animation have to be theatrical valid, your audience don't care if your character is natural, they care about the story. BELIEVE in your story, villians dont think they're villians.

In stage, the audience looks at the person talking.

In movies, they look at the person listening.

Some studios made the mistake of record first the text (audio) this looks like audio is more important than animation. THIS is why acting has almost nothing to do with WORDS.

Also It's good to think about what is your character thinking while they're speaking, for example is we have a romantic dinner and one of the persons says ''I love you''  to the other, could be a very confident one, a shy one, if it's the first time or the 100 time they say it, words are the same but body languages tells different stories.

ANIMATE the THOUGHT! 

Coming back to our romantic dinner, It's the first time saying I love you, how the other person is going to react? We are waiting for a BLINK.

Blinks are magical, they help to cut scenes and open to emotion. FUN FACT: We humans need 3 blinks per minute just to keep our eyes wet, all the other blinks are emotionals, full with thoughts. ANY 5 years old are experts on this.

Finally, Ed gave us the option to email him if we had any more questions. This was mine...

What do you think about foreign animation studios/work? More specific with Latinoamérica.

I am always curious how they see us in Latin America, in a few words He agreed with me that the industry in many countries is non-existent (like Honduras where we mainly animate for marketing). The studios that are being developed are mostly in Mexico and Brazil. Although, now with the pandemic the doors of working as an independent artist are opening more and more, it does not matter so much if you are in the same city or if you are in India, Thailand or who knows, Honduras. Now it depends more on your portfolio and your ability to make yourself known in the community.

Animation Community

This was another topic touched on in class these days, how to interact with the community of animators, there are different platforms (like auqi in ArtStation) where giving and receiving advice is easier and more, lately I like to see what people are doing on the AGORA Discord, Or review the processes of different artists on Twitch; but what I've really been paying a lot more attention to is the animation analytics that Frame by Frame Animation shares. (I told you before, breathing animation jaja).

Week 8: Conversations that are fun to watch! (lyp sinc)

This week we not only learned about lip syncing in class, it was also a topic covered at The VFX Festival but we'll get to it.

Apparently, there are 38 different phonemes in the English language, these phonemes have associated mouth shapes –a combination of different facial features working together to produce those sounds –jaw, lips, teeth, tongue, etc. 

Although my main problem is that I keep learning about how sounds are produced in English, for example I feel that L is easier to pronounce in English than in Spanish, but I have a problem with TT since in Spanish T has a stronger sound. (So in these cases, I'm seeing how other people pronounce it better LOL)

One of the things to remember is that we don't have to animate EVERY syllable, but work on dividing the sounds with the shape of the mouth.

We also have to think about how important the phrase is, what part is necessary to add certain expressions, for example: if someone is speaking in diminutive (such as talking to a baby or a pet) our mouth will have a different shape than if we speak in a normal way.

One of my favorite examples is the way Hana in Tokyo Godfathers, where She talks with a lot of energy and expression on her face.

Tokyo Godfather's example 

If we pay too much attention to each letter, our animation will be exaggerated, so we have to be careful in which breakdowns are functional; also VISEMES! According to wikipedia, A viseme is any of several speech sounds that look the same.  In class a comparison was made of how to pronounce mama and pebble, almost the same movement of the mouth.

With this in mind we usually only have 4 mouth positions, open, closed, wide and narrow. With the exception of certain sounds like F and V.

In class they gave us this table where it is explained in a better way how the sound distribution would be, I will leave them in high quality in case it works for someone else :) I printed it.

If the dialogue is too fast to fit two frames into the sync, steal a previous frame for the 2 frame count.An exception to this: Consonant, Vowel,  Consonant, Vowel,  Consonant, Vowel...

Tips for Lyp Sinc (in class)

• Mouth is not independent from face, TEN muscles are needed to smile! 
• Breakdown the audio and listen over and over and over!!!
• Peaks are likely your accents.
• Consider the scene setup, create CONTEXT and SUBTEXT
• Do not add too many poses.
• Body language change eveything, but be careful that is not eclipsing our facial acting.
• Time our facial expression BEFORE a major change in body position.
• Shapes 1 or 2 frames ahead of sounds can often work well, but late shapes NEVER work.
• When animating vowels, fast-in to the extreme shape, then soften it to a position that diminishes the sound.
• Make sure the rigs polys are not smooth preview mode!

Tips for Lyp Sinc by Chris Welsby #VFXfestival

During the week I had the pleasure of attending the conferences of the VFX Festival 2021, one of my favorites (and what a good time to see it) was that of Chris Welsby, Senior Animator at MPC, where he was explaining the process in the creation of this commercial focusing on lyp-sync.

Cat Litter from ARM & HAMMER™ TV Commercial

In the first place, Sync is the most difficult and crucial element of lyp-sinc animation, we should see the mouth shape before hearing the sound. Key shapes such as M/P/B/E and O should hold for at least 2 frames or they won't be readable. The software you choose to view your animation can have a BIG IMPACT on sync playback, be carefuuuuul!

Then we have Readability, It's crucial that the lip-sinc is clear and readable, be careful not to include too many phonemes as the animation could start to feel very choppy and hard to read. As mentioned earlier try to hold key sounds for as long as possible.

Think about tour camera angle and distance from the camera, REFERENCE!

The faster the dialogue the trickier this becomes.

Finally we have Emotion/Reference; emotion can have a big impact on the mouth shapes needed. VERY important to get the base sync and readability working firts. Once we have our sync, we can add emotion in the voice, our next stage is ti make it feel that the voice is really coming from your character.

-----> EYES and BROWS are importan at this stage as they will really help emphasis the emotion in the voice. <-------

★·.·´¯`·.·★ What to do when your audio does not work...? ★·.·´¯`·.·★ 

I had this problem where my audio did not work, in the end my teacher gave me the solution but just in case someone else is having the same problem, this is easy steps to check:

1. Your audio have to be .wav (not mp3 or something else, if not you can convert it with this free program Audacity)
2. Right click in yout timeline where your audio appers and check that you Playback Speed is set to Real-time.
3. Go to your preferences -> Settings -> Animation -> Evaluation mode and be sure is set to Parallel (my was in DG).

Week 9: Walk cycle and more lyp syn

During this week I was trying to experiment a little more with Lip Sync, after watching several tutorials and a couple more lectures I got ready to do the next class exercise.

What I tried to do was try to create a motion trial by focusing on the nose. Taking special care with overlapping and drag (hair and earring) I must say that I had special difficulty trying to achieve the shape of the mouth and even now I have been willing to practice a little more in creating mouth shapes.

This was the result:

These are some key points in the feedback given by my teacher:

• Play more in Anticipation
• Careful with Breakdowns
• When you do an action, '' What is leading the action? ''
• Mouth should be wider

Other tips he has given in class is to review:

• Book '' Anatomy of Facial Expression ''
• Website Face the FACS
• Google references for Facial Action Coding System.

I was also working a bit on practice and creating a walk cycle for my project, in this case I was reading over and over and over and over again "the walking section" From Animators Survival Kit, creating mini cycles and motion trials. 

However, all these details are explained in this video, including my sketches for the three projects. (Subs in english and spanish)

See you in Part 3