amanda

Another crucial part of an animation is lip syncing. Nobody would ever watch a cartoon with lip syncs that don't sync up to the dialogue they hear, would they?

When we were told that our new assignment this week was to create a lip sync for one of 6 given audio files, I was a bit daunted by it as I've never learnt about lip sync before, much less make it. After Ann broke it down into bits for us and telling us how to go about creating a lip sync, it was pretty doable.

On a side note, the audio that I went for was the 'Don't Blink' scene featured in Doctor Who. A classic line suitable for a project like this.

We spent the entirety of our stop-motion session just getting the exaggerated parts of our chosen audio down, and breaking down the words into phonetic sounds. From there, we started sketching out the type of lips that we wanted to use. Funnily enough, everyone started making weird shapes with their mouth while trying to grasp the exaggeration from their respective chosen audio.

For this project, we had to merge not only lip syncs to the main puppet but also body language to not only one puppet but two puppets! Also, let's not forget that we have to shoot it on ones.

I decided to make my lip sync lips in clay and in the style of Wallace & Gromit's mouth shapes. And this below is my final product!



Yeeeeah... it gets a little quick towards the end. I have a tendency to do that, don't I?

Have a nice day!

About more than 3 weeks ago, we were given a brief on a title sequence project, which consisted of:

Having to convey emotions with just faceless puppets and not having any audio/sounds to back it up is a fairly difficult task as it all comes down to body language. As Ursula once said it:

I genuinely liked how smooth it went. If I were to re-do it all over again, I would change the part where the puppet moves his finger in protest, and make sure that it isn't in a perfect arc. All in all, this exercise definitely goes to show that body language is always important when conveying a certain emotion. Have a nice day!

In our very first few stop-motion sessions with Ann, she told us to take turns in trying out what they called as a 'blind animation test', whereby you cover the laptop screen with a piece of paper or whatever you can find to cover the screen up, to prevent you from looking at what you've just taken as a shot.

It sounded fun, and received lots of oohs and ahs from us all. It was also something new that we needed to ease us back into that stop-motion routine. For this exercise, I used one of the puppets that we used in our first term (the robotic ones). I really like how crazy their hair looks, along with their crazy eyes and cool outfits.


Here goes:


Before even taking the first frame, I was just jumping up and down trying to calm myself down as the urge of looking at the screen was intense. Not gonna lie, but I definitely felt almost as anxious as the puppet who lost his keys. 
This was also shot on ones and I honestly feel like I'm slowly getting a hang of it, which is great! It was kind of frustrating when one of the joints just snaps into a position that costs you two to three ones-shots which makes the animation jumpy. 
I also realised that this exercise made me trust my instincts a little more when it came to animating with a puppet. It also made sure that I made my puppet have some emotions which us animators have to convey to our audiences.
All in all, this was an eye-opening class exercise which I truly enjoyed, while working alongside with the others! 
Have a nice day!

This term, the animation technique that I chose to have a full length experience in is stop-motion. There was definitely not a single ounce of doubt that I went through when I was asked to make a decision, a few months back. There's only 9 of us that chose this particular technique, out of the very many students in our year. I guess that's what makes us the very 'weird but special' breed of students.

To ease us back into using the puppets to animate, we were given the task of anticipation, action & follow through just as we were given in our first term (e.g., kick/punch). However, this time, we were told to shoot on ones. Shooting on ones took some time to get used to, since every tiny movement contributed to a smooth transitioning animation.

What made me excited was that we were given an induction to using better puppets a.k.a. second year puppets, which meant that we didn't have any excuses to produce a very robotic animation like we used to make, back in first term.

I chose to do the punch as it seemed like an overlooked action when it comes to animating. Having to test out how a punch was supposed to look like, I was back in my little corner in the stop-motion area throwing air punches upwards, sideways, front punch, uppercuts, etc. Animators do weird live-action tests sometimes...


This is my first try:

I was still trying to get used to the idea of taking it on ones. It still went really quickly and halfway through the shot, I really didn't like how it went but I had to finish it up before trying it out again.

This is my second try:

This second trial... the motion of the punch went too slow that it seemed like a tap on the second puppet's nose. Then it sped up really quickly at the end that made me sit in silence for a good minute, rethinking my life choices.

This is my final try:

I took this last attempt the day after the previous two shots and to be fair, it still went by really quick, but I liked how it flowed evenly. Even the punch felt like a punch! Can we also please talk about how nice the lighting was for this sequence? Bless the existence of white surfaces as a reflector.  Well, that's it for the punch sequences! I'm still trying to get a hang of shooting on ones– hopefully I'll get better at it soon. Have a nice day!

cr: Sherchle
Hello! So, after what seemed to be a long Christmas break and several inductions later... term 2 has officially begun. Not gonna lie, but there won't be as many posts as term 2 as most of the projects that will be on my blog will feature the completed versions for each module/project.

Let the journey of the final half of year one begin!

Hello, again.

So, over the course of the very empty and quiet three weeks that I had for Christmas break, I made a prior decision to stay back on campus and not travel home to Malaysia. Not gonna lie, it was a fairly tough decision to make, but let's get on to the real thing. While majority of the people that I know travelled home safe and sound, I had the privilege to experience a very, very, very, dead silent studio. Before the break started, I started making some gifs for my showreel, which were just very simple pandas doing simple motions, and I'm going to be honest with you, I'm pretty hooked on doing these little gifs!

 1) The "dabbing" motion is something that most of us first years are pretty much... invested in, during the first term- so, I incorporated that into the panda and added it into the starting title card of my showreel.

I would say that doing gifs of simple, solo characters/objects would be possible on FireAlpaca, and for more characters/objects that require different set of timings, TVPaint would be more suitable. Well, here ends the final week of the Christmas break!

Hope you've all had a very Merry Christmas, and, oh! Happy New Year! Here's to more self-discovery and exploration around animation, the mediums, and also the art form itself in 2017!

Until then.