Lipsync

I'm now finished with a piece of animation that I've been working on for quite some time now, it's been an ongoing project that I've been working on, off and on. And now it's finished! Well, as you animators know, one can tweek the animation and work more on it, for me it's the piece itself that explains to me when or if it's done... I'm now going to share the linetests that I did along the way, so you can follow the process. The finished clip is at the bottom.

The character (Raccoon) is created by me.

The audio is "borrowed" from American Pie 2, it's one of the band camp kids that explains why you shouldn't bring food to band camp.

After analyzing the audio, thinking about what he is saying, how he is saying it. I did some sketches, took photos of the them and put them together with the audio, to get the feel of it.

Here I've done some more work on it, but still it's very crude.

Yet more work, and still keeping it loose to really find the right keys. On the above tests I haven't been focusing on being "on model" what's been more important is to find the right keys that can carry the sequence. My goal with this animation was to really breath life into the character, I wanted the animation to to be a "a piece of life".

Here is the first linetest with actual animation, although being very loose and still trying to work it all out. This was the first test that I sent to my mentor, so he could get me pointers on where I needed to do more work.

Here is the first cleaned up test, right about now I started to think that I was done with it, but I wasn't...

I needed to change a few things so I did...

When I sent this test to my mentor he gave it his blessing, maybe he was more tired of it than I was...? But I still found some things to work on...

...so I did and here it is, the finished animation! Ta-daaa!

Take care!