I was happy to be able to attend the voice record for these jobs. I got to see the real kids read the scripts over and over in the sound booth and was even allowed to throw my two cents in regarding the read; "Louder!, Slower, Perfect!!". But Olgivy - the agency - was there to handle it. They had cast two great kids, after searching for months in North America, for the roles of Elizebeth and her little brother Andrew. When the record was over I arranged a little one on one with the kids and videotaped them doing their lines. Great reference. After the audio track was compiled using the best takes we took it back to Redrover and I was ready to begin. But before I touched the mouse (or stylus in my case) I needed to nail down the performance...
STEP 2: Animation Planning
This step is always the most important. At a time when I just want to get started, I had to force myself to take the necessary time here. The more I knew before I started animating on the computer, the faster I'd work, and the better my animation would be. I listened to the audio until I knew it word for word, and could repeat it. I listened carefully to the energy of the words to see where it was weak and strong. I then made some thumbnail drawings of some of poses I'd been seeing in my head. Then it was acting time; I found a quiet room in the studio and pretended I was a little girl for a couple hours : ) I took breaks to keep the fresh ideas flowing. I practiced the performance in different ways to force myself to see all the possibilities. In the end, I went with the performance that felt the most natural to me. When I cleared my mind and just did what came natural, without thinking too hard, it seemed right. With these spots, the acting felt best subtle. I really believe that if you can't act out a scene you're responsible for, you won't be able to do a good job.
STEP 3: Animation pass one : Choreography
Frame one is often the most challenging. The whole animation is based off of it. I spent a long time getting the kids in the scene, sitting at the table in a comfortable pose. Once that was done I began the long process of going through the entire thirty seconds and posing out the characters. I didn't spend too long nailing each pose. I took it to about 80% because I knew that many of them would change drastically. Its not JUST about a great pose, but how it works with all the other poses; this animation required choreography. So I blasted through the first pass of animation with this in mind. There were cookies that needed to be picked up, put down, and passed. The kids had to be just the right distance apart to accommodate the interaction they would need to have. The posing had to work within the environment and it's staging; a great pose isn't so great when you put a plate of muffins in the way. Hence, there was no need to get caught up in pretty motion or beautiful drawings/poses at this point. Once I had all the logistics worked out, I was ready to move on.
*Note* From the beginning I was using spline/auto/smooth tangents. I do a pose and copy it to create a hold. The end result is the character moving stiffly from one pose to the next with the rough timing laid in. I use spline keys instead of step keys because I like to see the timing right away.
STEP 4: Animation pass two
The second pass is just a second layer of detail. I looked closer at each pose and tightened it a bit. I added important in-betweens, anticipation poses, overshoots, etc. BUT I made sure to keep my keys clean - all bones and controllers keyed on the same frame for a particular pose so if I selected the whole rig I could easily alter timing. For this 30 second animation, I took it line by line and looked for natural breaks in the dialogue. I tightened one line at a time and then moved on. At this point, I wanted to see eyes but not necessarily expression. I'd got the posing and timing in the proper vicinity and I was ready to move on. Click the image to play animation pass 2.
STEP 5: Rough Lip Sync
Next I wanted to do a rough pass of lipsync and to add in important expressions. To start myself off with lipsync, I scrubbed slowly through the timeline and added a keyframe whenever I heard an accent in the voice - on the exact frame I heard it. I tried to keep the amount of keys to a minimum - a key on every syllable tends to give poppy, distracting effects. When I was finished laying down the keys for one line, I selected those keys and dragged them back about 3 frames and had a look at the animation. After some quick timing adjustments it looked passable. I knew I'd return to this later, but I moved on to the next line and did the same thing.
* The reason for doing this step, at this point, was so that I could see the animation in a somewhat complete state. I wanted to bring the whole animation to a certain level - so that I could see how far I'd come and how much further I needed to go.
STEP 6: Animation pass three : Meat and Potatoes
Now it was just a matter of taking what I had and making it better. I decided to keep with the idea of taking it line for line as it helped to keep me focused. To show the client (and myself) what the final animation quality would look like, I animated the first line to 95%. It was a chance to test the techniques I was planning to use and work out the kinks before I started applying them to the whole 30 seconds. My approach to this pass was as follows:
1) Start with making sure the body and head were posed just right.
2) Look at the way the character moves from one pose to the next (if there were multiple poses within one line). Add all the in-betweens to make the transition nice. Add arcs and favor keys. Add overlapping action and offset the timing - like the hands from the body or from one hand to the other.
3) Add all the little head motions that hit the dialogue accents.
4) Add squashes to the head to punch up the dialogue.
5) Take a closer look at the lipsync and polish it off
6) Tighten eye direction and add pupil motion like 'darts' where necessary
7) Add eye and eyebrow animation; the antics and overshoots, the squashes and stretches.
8) Add moving holds.
When I had done all these things to each line (or main action that the character performed) I had a nearly complete animation.
STEP 7: Finishing touches
Now was the time to sit back and look at the whole thing and write out a long list of things I wanted to improve. All the components were there but it was by no means perfect. I began the process of going through the animation and removing all the mistakes until I couldn't see any more. I made sure the file was in good shape to be passed on to Richard for rendering. (Thanks very much to Matt Kowaliszyn for helping me with some of the final details of this spot. He animated the tongues, fixed intersecting geo, animated the objects on the table when it gets kicked, etc.) The animation was complete and I was exhausted. STEP 1: Audio
I was happy to be able to attend the voice record for these jobs. I got to see the real kids read the scripts over and over in the sound booth and was even allowed to throw my two cents in regarding the read; "Louder!, Slower, Perfect!!". But Olgivy - the agency - was there to handle it. They had cast two great kids, after searching for months in North America, for the roles of Elizebeth and her little brother Andrew. When the record was over I arranged a little one on one with the kids and videotaped them doing their lines. Great reference. After the audio track was compiled using the best takes we took it back to Redrover and I was ready to begin. But before I touched the mouse (or stylus in my case) I needed to nail down the performance...
STEP 2: Animation Planning
This step is always the most important. At a time when I just want to get started, I had to force myself to take the necessary time here. The more I knew before I started animating on the computer, the faster I'd work, and the better my animation would be. I listened to the audio until I knew it word for word, and could repeat it. I listened carefully to the energy of the words to see where it was weak and strong. I then made some thumbnail drawings of some of poses I'd been seeing in my head. Then it was acting time; I found a quiet room in the studio and pretended I was a little girl for a couple hours : ) I took breaks to keep the fresh ideas flowing. I practiced the performance in different ways to force myself to see all the possibilities. In the end, I went with the performance that felt the most natural to me. When I cleared my mind and just did what came natural, without thinking too hard, it seemed right. With these spots, the acting felt best subtle. I really believe that if you can't act out a scene you're responsible for, you won't be able to do a good job.
STEP 3: Animation pass one : Choreography
Frame one is often the most challenging. The whole animation is based off of it. I spent a long time getting the kids in the scene, sitting at the table in a comfortable pose. Once that was done I began the long process of going through the entire thirty seconds and posing out the characters. I didn't spend too long nailing each pose. I took it to about 80% because I knew that many of them would change drastically. Its not JUST about a great pose, but how it works with all the other poses; this animation required choreography. So I blasted through the first pass of animation with this in mind. There were cookies that needed to be picked up, put down, and passed. The kids had to be just the right distance apart to accommodate the interaction they would need to have. The posing had to work within the environment and it's staging; a great pose isn't so great when you put a plate of muffins in the way. Hence, there was no need to get caught up in pretty motion or beautiful drawings/poses at this point. Once I had all the logistics worked out, I was ready to move on.
*Note* From the beginning I was using spline/auto/smooth tangents. I do a pose and copy it to create a hold. The end result is the character moving stiffly from one pose to the next with the rough timing laid in. I use spline keys instead of step keys because I like to see the timing right away.
STEP 4: Animation pass two
The second pass is just a second layer of detail. I looked closer at each pose and tightened it a bit. I added important in-betweens, anticipation poses, overshoots, etc. BUT I made sure to keep my keys clean - all bones and controllers keyed on the same frame for a particular pose so if I selected the whole rig I could easily alter timing. For this 30 second animation, I took it line by line and looked for natural breaks in the dialogue. I tightened one line at a time and then moved on. At this point, I wanted to see eyes but not necessarily expression. I'd got the posing and timing in the proper vicinity and I was ready to move on. Click the image to play animation pass 2.
STEP 5: Rough Lip Sync
Next I wanted to do a rough pass of lipsync and to add in important expressions. To start myself off with lipsync, I scrubbed slowly through the timeline and added a keyframe whenever I heard an accent in the voice - on the exact frame I heard it. I tried to keep the amount of keys to a minimum - a key on every syllable tends to give poppy, distracting effects. When I was finished laying down the keys for one line, I selected those keys and dragged them back about 3 frames and had a look at the animation. After some quick timing adjustments it looked passable. I knew I'd return to this later, but I moved on to the next line and did the same thing.
* The reason for doing this step, at this point, was so that I could see the animation in a somewhat complete state. I wanted to bring the whole animation to a certain level - so that I could see how far I'd come and how much further I needed to go.
STEP 6: Animation pass three : Meat and Potatoes
Now it was just a matter of taking what I had and making it better. I decided to keep with the idea of taking it line for line as it helped to keep me focused. To show the client (and myself) what the final animation quality would look like, I animated the first line to 95%. It was a chance to test the techniques I was planning to use and work out the kinks before I started applying them to the whole 30 seconds. My approach to this pass was as follows:
1) Start with making sure the body and head were posed just right.
2) Look at the way the character moves from one pose to the next (if there were multiple poses within one line). Add all the in-betweens to make the transition nice. Add arcs and favor keys. Add overlapping action and offset the timing - like the hands from the body or from one hand to the other.
3) Add all the little head motions that hit the dialogue accents.
4) Add squashes to the head to punch up the dialogue.
5) Take a closer look at the lipsync and polish it off
6) Tighten eye direction and add pupil motion like 'darts' where necessary
7) Add eye and eyebrow animation; the antics and overshoots, the squashes and stretches.
8) Add moving holds.
When I had done all these things to each line (or main action that the character performed) I had a nearly complete animation.
STEP 7: Finishing touches
Now was the time to sit back and look at the whole thing and write out a long list of things I wanted to improve. All the components were there but it was by no means perfect. I began the process of going through the animation and removing all the mistakes until I couldn't see any more. I made sure the file was in good shape to be passed on to Richard for rendering. (Thanks very much to Matt Kowaliszyn for helping me with some of the final details of this spot. He animated the tongues, fixed intersecting geo, animated the objects on the table when it gets kicked, etc.) The animation was complete and I was exhausted.
No comments:
Post a Comment