Digital Acting 2 - Lip Sync project

Good day.

It is now time to wrap up my Lip Sync project, since I am done with the animation, rendering and composing. I will give a description of the process I went through to accomplish this task.

1 - Planning

The first thing I did in the planning stage was to decide whether I would go for a full body or a facial only animation. As this project objective was to study, experiment and produce a lip sync animation, I decided I should choose the facial animation so that I could focus only in the essentials of Lip Sync.


The rig choice I made was also with this objective in mind, so I went for Tito Rig, courtesy of Enrique Gato Borregán (http://www.xaloc.net/freeStuff_Tito.htm). The rig has 17 expressions that can be used from the morpher channels, and allows for quite nice control over facial expressions and construction of phonemes.

The next step was to choose a sound file to use. I made the decision of making one myself, first because it was fun and second because it allowed me to introduce a bit of my creativity into the project and create something funny (at least for me) to work with. I made a simple script line stating the following:


"Good day! We are now live from Lisbon to report an... Woooooooowwwww maaann! Did you see that? What was it? Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No wait... It´s IMF!"

This might not be that funny, but my intention was to make a satirical joke about the situation in Portugal, with the arrival of the International Monetary Found to help with the economical crisis.

I recorded myself saying it so that I could observe all of the expressions used by me while saying the script. I felt this was a better option than finding a sound clip in which I could only hear the voice of someone acting. While a bit embarrassing, it was a better study material. This was the clip I made of myself:

I then picked up an exposure sheet so that I could write down the phonemes used by me while saying the script. I only used 9 of the 40 existing phonemes in the English language, as advised. They were enough, and I understood that we actually don´t pronounce every single word with our lips while talking, and by using only these 9, I could come quite close to the expressions made.

In my exposure sheet, I had 50 frames by page. In this project I used a frame rate of 24 fps, so I divided the sound wave in sections of 2.08 seconds each, which corresponds to 50 frames. I did this, so that I could have an image of my wave to paste over my exposure sheet and write down the phonemes used at the correct frame. This also allowed me to time my animation quite well, even though it was not 100% accurate.

2 - Animation

Having the planning done it was time to start animating. I used my sound file in 3D Max so that I could synchronize my animation with the sound, while I was creating the key frames. I had watched several videos, and read several pages about Lip Sync to discover which methods I could use and which ones I felt more comfortable working with.

There was a reference in our school page´s that was the best one for me: http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-make-lip-sync-animation

The way Thadeej breaks up the process in 4 steps really makes things a lot easier. I decided to follow his method and it worked out quite well for me.

So my process consisted of these four steps:

Foundation

This was where I heard my audio file hundreds of times, said the script myself, watched myself saying it. I just had everything in my mind before I started.

 Structure

I created all the frames correspondent to the mouth positions I wrote down in my exposure sheet. This gave me a very good starting point. It broke my animation in four simple mouth movements: Wide, narrow, open and closed.

 Details

At this point I started adding the small details to the mouth positions and making them more correspondent to the phonemes I wrote in my exposure sheet. I also created the basic eyebrow, head and neck movements.

Polish

In this final stage I rendered my whole animation because I wanted to have a look at a preview of the final result so that I could write down the final adjustments needed. I found several things I had to change. Most of them were in the Eye phonemes and the OOO phonemes. I had keyed them a bit exaggerated so I changed them to give a more fluid and natural feeling to the animation.

3 - Post production

With all of this done it was time to render my animation. To support my story I wanted to add a video of a location in Lisbon, called the "Praça do Comércio", so I rendered my animation with a green background. I then added the video in Premiere, and added as well some other small details (a news network logo) to make the scene complete.  

This project was extremely fun to do. I have a tendency of looking at peoples lips when I talk to them, so I am used to reading phonemes in peoples lips, I just did not know that what I did instinctively could be so useful for me as an animator. I will post my final project in a separate post as I still need to add a couple of things.

Edit: I had to edit the post since my scans of the exposure sheet didn´t show everything I wrote, some parts look erased.

Digital Acting 2 - Push and Pull animation

Hello!

Another of the tasks in Digital Acting 2 was to create a Push and Pull animation, with two characters interacting with each other in a conflict situation.

The plot for this animation goes as this: Two friends met in a bar, had a couple of drinks and decided to ask for the check. The barman sends the check to the one that asked and then they go into a conflict to decide who pays the drinks. Then the barman decides to intervene and stops them, takes the check away and gives one check to each.

It is not a very polished animation, as this took me around 10 hours more or less to do. Hope you enjoy :)

Digital Acting 2 - Facial Animation and Lip Sync

Good day!

Another activity in Digital Acting 2 was to pose a character that is holding a really dirty and smelly cloth and express the emotion of the character through his posing and facial expression.

We were supposed to use another rig, but I used Max Rig (http://www.3dluvr.com/clisk3d/) since it allows me to set up facial expressions and I already know how to work with it.

I started of by watching myself in the mirror and observe the position of my lips, eyes and eyebrows, to better understand what sort of expression would I do if I was imagining that I was holding this disgusting cloth. What I observed was that my eyes would curve themselves a bit upwards, they would be almost closed. My head would be turning away from the cloth to try and avoid the smell while holding it. My eyebrows would form a sort of inverted U, with the outer parts more curved, and they would go upwards. And my lips curved downwards, in a inverted U form, like my eyebrows. My mouth would be slightly open showing a bit of teeth.

I then grabbed my sketch book and made some simple posing of the body. I did not observe this in myself, I decided to trust my imagination and draw it off to see what i came up with. Result wasn't that bad, and with all this information was time to pose the rig.

I made one simple pose and six different camera shots:

I think that most of the angles, if not all, could work. But that's just me :).

Write you soon!

Digital Acting 2 - Pose and Act

Hello!

Lately Blogger UI has been down so I could not post updates on how my project is going. I have already done some of the activities and Pose and Act was the first. The objective is to pose a rig in two extreme and opposite poses expressing a feeling.

I chose to pose mine in, first, a pose of extreme anger, as if he was taking part of an argument with some other character, and second, and opposed to the first one, a pose of extreme happiness and joy.

These are my poses:

The happy pose works pretty fine, when I posed  the character I tried to have the audience in mind and to think from which perspective would help bring the emotion my character is expressing in a stronger way. I also had in mind that in this case, even though his body language gives the audience a sense of happiness, the flow lines in his pose lead to his face, which is where I intend to lead the audience eyes to.

Now on the angry pose, even though it is strong and expressive, and as it was pointed out by my teacher, there is one thing that could be improved to express exactly the feeling of anger: the camera position. It should be pointing up, towards my character's face. This just gives the pose a much stronger impact towards the audience. I posed him accordingly and this is how it looks:

 

There was also a quiz to be completed with this activity. Here are the questions and my answers:

Question A:

1. Thinking leads to conclusions; emotion leads to action.

Human beings, either consciously or unconsciously, are constantly thinking. Thinking makes us feel, it leads us to emotion according to the situations we are in. And when we feel emotion, we always react to it. This is what makes us humans and sets us aside from other animals.

2. Acting is reacting. Acting is doing.

To do something is a response to a felt emotion. In order to do something towards that emotion, we first need to feel it and then react to it. Humans never sit and feel an emotion without any kind of exterior evidence or reaction shown about it.


3. Character needs to have an objective.

A character needs to be doing something 100% of the time he is in a scene. He needs to have a purpose and pursue that objective by performing actions that will ultimately lead to it.

4. Character plays on action until something happens to make him/her play a different action.

This rule relates to the previous one. Our character needs to constantly be active, to have a purpose or a reason to be doing something, until another objective is presented to him. He should always be moving from one action to another.

5. All actions begin with movement.

Theatrical actions require a more expressive external movement, than real life actions. This is related to the fact that emotions lead to actions. If our character does not express his emotions with an action, he is not acting.

6. Empathy is the magic key as audiences empathize with emotion.

Empathy is what an actor, or character, should make the audience feel towards his expressed emotions. If an audience relates to that characters emotions, they empathize with him and this builds a connection between character and audience.

7. A scene is a negotiation.

Negotiation implies conflict, obstacles and opposing needs, and suggests a positive resolution. Theatrical moments require conflict, they require overcoming obstacles. These conflicts can be internal, with other characters or with the situation.

Question B:

1. Is it best to animate force or form in your character animation?

It is best to animate force because it is a result of thinking and emotion expression and the audience empathizes with that.

2. Who talks about ma? What is ma?

The Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Ma is a pause in the action. Ma, in my point of view, creates a stronger emphasis in sound-less moments in the action of a scene.

3. What is a Power Center? Can you give an example of a Power Center?

Power center is a body reflection of ones personality. Everyone has a different power center. A confident person has its power center in his chest and its power center leads his movements forward, normally pointing his chest out, showing that confidence.

Question C:

1. What is meant by Active listening?

Active listening is actually to be doing something while listening. To hear, understand, determine an answer, realizing your surroundings while not speaking in a dialogue while the other person is talking, and at the same time to express all these actions without saying them.

Question D:

1. Why do you have to remember the fruit salad?

Because you can't reach the end of a scene without having your character to go through all of the thoughts that the scene action requires. Otherwise your character performance will always lack something.

2. Who was Denis Diderot? What did he write about? How does this help animators?

Denis Diderot was a philosopher that wrote about the duality in action, on how an actor must always have control of his performance, and can never be observing their acting. The actors, no matter how much they try, they can't be 100% in the moment of the scene.

His theory is important for animators because the way we act while animating is exactly by using the duality that Diderot refers to. We act and observe our acting.

That's all for now. Be back soon!