Very Short Dialogue Shot [Character Performance - Unit 06]

Very Short Dialogue Shot

01/07/24

Introduction

The focus of this next animation exercise was to build on the previous one, however, this time to begin practising using the mouth and animating the face. Rather than build up too quickly this starts with just focusing on one word to apply the core theory. The core theory I explored was : 

  • Body language is still the most important factor in conveying convincing and emotive lip synch character performance animation.
  • Actions and poses should come roughly 2 frames before the audio to feel like they are in synch with one another.
  • Open the jaw on the vowels and close on the consonants.
  • Simplify the audio to the key sounds rather than trying to articulate every letter.
  • Start with the jaw and then think about the squash and stretch.
  • Wide and narrow mouth shapes depending on how much different words are emphasised.
  • Consider how much teeth to show - a lot of personality can be shown here.
  • Phoenemes and visemes are the shapes of the different sounds and act as the core of the lip synch mouth posing. 
  • Use a mirror to study your own mouth and analyse the mouth shapes.
  • Draw the mouth shapes from studying the dialogue - this will help you find the accents and understand where the exaggerated poses should be in addition to what other mouth poses you will need generally.

Project Management

At this point in time I am on track but it is a little intense managing all my responsibilities. Now that all the lectures were available on the virtual learning environment I’d spent some time to study all the core theory and apply it to the exercises I was exploring. It also showed that if I was unable to complete all exercises before the time I needed to start the assignment then I would have at least absorbed all the key theory to apply to my assignment.

It was looking likely that unit 09 and unit 10 would be cut as they seemed less relevant and served as additional exercises to practise. However, I wanted to make sure I explored all the dialogue animations before I went away so that I had the most amount of practise before I returned from my holiday to then put into my assignment animation.



Audio and Concept

I again started with finding my audio clip and considering what my concept would be. I was looking for a one word clip that had a lot of emotion in it. 

Below shows the range of clips I explored and considered :

I settled on the ‘Blast’ voice clip from Jumanji (1995). I felt like this had a lot of angry emotion in and would be a good candidate for developing a short story concept. I thought that I could reuse my office set and instead have the character smash their fist down on the desk in frustration.

Research

The below videos show the research I explored to help develop this concept.

I started with looking at the source material of the voice clip from Jumanji (1995) accessed via the below YouTube clip (Jumanji 1080p Blast!, 2015) . The facial posing was particularly interesting, although the body language was less exaggerated.


The tone of voice got me thinking about Nigel Thornberry from the Thornberries. He is quite a quirky character with interesting mannerisms. I found the below compilation clip (Best of Nigel Thornberry, 2020) that showed an variety of animation acting from this character.

Acting Reference

I wasn’t finding exactly what I had in my mind’s eye so I explored acting to gather more effective reference. The below clips show my exploration of acting out this scene to build something that I could use.



One of my takes was particularly useful so I decided to pull out the key poses and annotate these as the image shows below. As such, I felt I had a captured the essence of the animation and didn’t need thumbnails. Therefore, I moved into animation next.

To help plan the animation a little further I made some timing notes based on importing the audio clip to Maya. I did this because I wasn’t confident that my initial timing guess on the analysis above was correct.


As such this is the corrected frames for each pose :

  • 31 = High accent pose with arm in the air
  • 35 = B - Maybe pull earlier to 33 - Dip slightly on this
  • 37 = LA - Maybe Pull earlier to 35 ( Also slamming down at this point)
  • 43 - 49 = ST - Maybe pull earlier to 41 - 47 S to T with accent on the T at 47
  • 63 = Settle

Animation

Environment Set Up :


Blocking and Blocking Plus :


Spline : 


Spline Refine :


02/07/24

Spline Refine Further Including Head Tweaks :


Facial Animation Development :


Polish Pass :

Conclusion

This was a good exercise leading to a good outcome. I feel I really captured the frustration in the character through body and facial posing. It also goes to show that the animation production pipeline is key to develop strong outcomes, however, each animation is different and may require more exploration of one part of the pipeline. In this case acting was really key and the analysis of my captured acting footage enabled me to develop a strong base for this animation. I feel this is improved in quality compared to my previous animation which shows that my skills are progressing following the study of theory and practical experimentation.

The learning outcomes, listed below, have been achieved because :
  1. Lip sync techniques have been used to deliver a clear voice line with some story telling elements. 
  2. This has studied phoenemes and translated them into visemes to sync the lips to the audio
  3. The 'Willy' rig hasn't been used, however a more complex humanoid rig has been used to compete the animation exercise due to personal preference.
  4. Emotion and personality has been implemented by reflecting the anger and annoyance from the voice line into the character's animation.
  5. Research has inspired primary reference capture that has been studied to create thumbnails that have been used to execute a full animation sequence.

Learning Outcomes

  1. Master the technique of synchronising a character's lip movements with spoken dialogue.
  2. Understand and animate phonemes.
  3. Utilise the "Willy" rig for dialogue animation.
  4. Convey emotion and personality through lip-sync animation.
  5. Develop the skill to plan, storyboard, and execute a short dialogue animation project from start to finish.

Reference List

  1. Best of Nigel Thornberry (2020) YouTube video, added by Funbucket at the Movies [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-vVOHNZDP4 (Accessed 12th January 2025).
  2. Jumanji (1995) Johnston, J. USA: Columbia Pictures.
  3. Jumanji 1080p Blast! (2015) YouTube video, added by Mabus Winnfield [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-vVOHNZDP4 (Accessed 12th January 2025).


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