A Complex Character
Added 2018-05-24 01:25:21 +0000 UTCToday was all about mouth animation, 10,000 frames of mouth animation. This requires going through each syllable of dialogue and deciding which mouth shapes best convey the sound happening in that fraction of a second (notice how in the timeline above, there's one second when I had to change the mouth shape 10 times - fast speech is a nightmare!). As tedious as that is, it's actually easy compared to drawing all the mouth shapes, 12 for each position (3/4, profile, and front), 36 mouth drawings in all, which I cycle between to create the illusion of talking. Unlike many other cartoons, I include much of the head as part of the mouth, so that I can animate jaw movement with speech. Notice how in many other cartoons they just animate the mouths with no jaw movement.
Mouth days are brainless days, because the audio tells me how to animate the mouth. Everything else requires thought. How and when should I move fingers, hands, feet, arms, legs, torso, eyeballs, eyelids, eyebrows, head, shoulders, 126 layers in all, for one character? Once I decide that, I animate, render, edit, add sound effects/music, titles, effects, credits, render again, and it's done! This one is actually a pretty simple scene, with mostly one character talking. I should be able to get it done soon.
