Finished Animation

Critical Review

My aim for this project was to produce an animation that involved lip syncing, I believe I have achieved this to a degree. My animation is not finished due to my lack of time allocation for this project. However, the animation which I have done so far is of a decent standard in my opinion, though I could have done better with the time I had. 

I screened my animation and received positive feedback and also suggestions on improvements that would help my animation. I have taken the feedback and fixed what I have, I think screening my work has helped a lot, as well as having people view my work as I am animating to give me more ideas and suggestions on improvement.

I haven't had many problems with animating, only a slight Vcam issue which was fixed relatively quick. Apart from that I have found this project to very good and learning to use keyframe caddy was a nice experience, I would like to use it more as it has been extremely helpful with lip syncing and has been easy to use. 

Overall, I think I have done well with what I have, but I could do a lot better. I also need to improve with my research as that is lacking and if I had more research I could have come up with some better ideas. I also need to use more of my free time to work on my projects so I would be able to finish in time and complete my projects to even higher standards. This is one of my weak points when working.

In conclusion, there are still many things that need addressing, but it has been a pleasant and educational experience.

If I were to re-do this project I would make sure to make time to work on the animation so that I can complete it for the deadline.

Progress and Final Animation

So far I have 30 seconds of animations that I showed to my peers for feedback. 

They said that the overall style was god and the animation was well done so far. Also they said the lip syncing and the timing was nicely done, but that I still have a lot more to do. I could have made the clicking of the fingers faster to make it more realistic and add in some more secondary animation such as when we see the heads of the audience. It was also suggested to add in some clicking sounds with the clicking. Doing this would give the animation more depth and it would look more interesting to the viewer. They also noticed at one part my character had no neck in the scene and this needs to be added in so he does not look like a floating head.

As of 13/01/2014 I have addressed the majority of the feedback issues, the only things I have yet to adjust are the sound on the clicking and my secondary animation is very simple as I am running low on time to add in more detailed animation.

Compared to my previous years I am slightly more on task with what I am doing but I am still falling behind animation wise. I needed to allocated more time to animating than I have, so at the moment my animation is not anywhere near finished, which is a shame as I think this was one of my better animation works.

Here is my final animation

Animating

I started animating, I am mainly doing frame by frame animation but I am using tweens here and there to save some time. I have also been using key frame caddy to help with the lip syncing process and Vcam to help me with more camera shots to my animation. Like in the image below where I used Vcam to add some extra shots into the image so it wasn't so boring.

I did have some trouble with the Vcam when I had it the same size as my stage it was showing parts of the image that were meant to be cut off, so to fix this I simply made the Vcam smaller than the stage and this fixed the problem.

I found the lip sync rather easy once I had drawn out all the mouth frames I needed. I used three layers in the face graphic clip so I could animated the eyes, mouth and chin separately so my character would have more movement to him.

Keyframe caddy is a very helpful plugin for Flash and makes animating a lot simpler, using it still left me with the frame by frame style, but without the hassle of having to re-draw every mouth movement.

Lip Sync Test 2

I  did another lip sync test using keyframe caddy this one came out better than the first and I also use slightly less mouth frames per word so the mouth isn't moving too fast so the animation doesn't look weird and unlike the first test I also animated the jaw to match the movement of the mouth to make the talking look more realistic.

Mood Board

I put together some colours and images of scenes that suit the theme I'm going for in my animation, I like warm orange and red tones for the colour scheme and a old style jazz bar look to the animation setting. As for character styles they will be simple, slightly deformed looking, with big heads and smaller bodies, because I wanted to make it look a bit cuter rather than doing more realistic characters.

As I have decided to continue with the song but in a different style I will be keeping the same theme/colour schemes, but animating the characters in a different style to the first. So to sum it up the first part of the animation will be in a cute deformed style and the second part will in a more realistic (proportion wise) style.

Anamatic

I made a basic anamatic to get the timing down for my animation, I feel I could of drawn a few more scenes in to make it more interesting but if I'm to do another short animation to accompany this one I'd rather keep it simple so I have time to do both.

I've also been thinking making two animations will be somewhat time consuming, but I would really like to use the style that I planned to use fro my first animation. So I have decided I will animate the rest of the song, but using a different style to the first. I will be making a second animatic shortly to accompany this one.