Lip sync reflection

For the lip sync visual elective we started by picking out a sound. It had to be 10-15 seconds long. We had range of options, TikTok, memes, songs. The sound was the start point to creating the animation. I chose a 10 second sound where two men are eating and enjoying themselves. To start off my project I made moodboards of the type of lip sync animation I wanted to create,

I made a moodboard for both characters, the backgrounds and some scene inspiration. This helped me visualise the story I wanted to tell in such a short time. The range of moodboards helped me ease into the visuals that i wanted to portray. the storyboard flowed and I came up with the idea of 2 guys, visually different  one short, big kinda ugly, the other skinny tall and normal-ish. These two guys both sharing this meal, one guy dips his fry in his milkshake and they bond over this quirky gesture. When making the storyboard i had to start thinking about how i wanted the camera movements to work, how the focus point of scenes would work and what layout would work best. The first scene of my animation I made the direction to have the character dipping his fry in the shake zoomed in, to signify this as a main event of these opposites finding there link. I chose to stick to very simple camera movements, for example when my character would be talking the focus of the scene would be on them, the ending scene is both of them together in agreement, they are both in the frame so that you can see them both together. I wanted to make the aesthetic of the animation trippy, so colour, background and character design were very important. I took inspiration from the series midnight gospel, the artist Zoe pham, and a couple more like spirited away which i feature in the scene inspiration moodboard. They use shaky type of animation, saturated colours, weird looking character designs. For example the spirited away scene where the parents eat away like pigs and ended up turning into pigs, I liked the way the scene was layed and how sloppy the visual of the animation came out. In midnight gospel the use of bright, kinda outer dimensions colours used was something I really liked about the show and wanted to incorporate it into my animation . For pre production I created character turnarounds of both characters, front back, three-quarters and side view.  Mouth sheets of the different shapes the mouths would make with different sounds. background design, I knew I wanted it to be set in a inter dimensional trippy diner. Once this was finished I had some feedback from my peers which inspired me to make my animation using a boil effects, and some feedback that helped me narrow down my final character designs leading me to use very saturated colours and very simple shape language to really push the contrast between my two characters. My narrative behind the 10 second animation is that there is these two completely different people yet they still manage to bond over there munchies. We started by making rough animatic and then focusing on the key frames of each scene, once that was done I moved on to the in between. I imported the sound into toonboom and would try to time out when the words and the mouth needed to sync up. Once that was complete I started with line art and colour, which I did on procreate to save some time. In addition because I was animating with boil effect every 4 frames I would change the line art to make it less smooth and appear more shaky. To conclude this project i would say that during the animation process I felt like I had no time, we had to pick a sound make our key frames, add the in between and colour all whilest learning. However I found it very fun and exciting cause it pushed me to think faster and do faster. I did manage to complete my animation and was very happy with the outcome, especially with my characters consistency throughout the animation which i thought I would struggle with most. I would like to practice more key framing and in between in for future projects because I struggled a lot to make the animation flow at first.