An Irish Band is Caught Lip Synching; Sham Rock
For the given lip synch I wanted to go with something elegant, flowing, and try to use some techniques I had explored in previous exercises. I took from the follow-through exercises on the bouncing character all the way back to execute her bouncy hair. I worked from a reference of myself performing the line, but tried to mix in the sophisticated sassiness of the original performance by Bette Davis. Overall I feel happy with it.
The lip synch itself I think works effectively, because of the change in angles, I also got to practise drawing the mouth shapes from various angles, which I think will be really useful going forward.
Where I am lacking is in timing and performance. I am finding it hard to know how far to push exaggeration in animating characters, and making it look natural, not cartoony (because that just isn’t my aim), but still injecting the drama that animation allows for.
Myself and a bunch of other students decided to have some fun with the recorded lip synch! We decided we were going to do a criminal line-up, where our character stated their name and crime to the camera.
I chose Jemma. A Little Britain Inspired chav with a surprising penchant for animal rights. I loveD this one! Loved animating it, loved recording it, the whole process was so much fun. Due to my commercial clean up work, I wasn’t able to finish it to the point I wanted to, so I will be adding in-betweens to make it smoother, as well as colour for the final film that we edit together.
Again, I am happy with the mouth shapes themselves, it is more the timing I find difficult. I thought I had done ok timing wise, as I had worked directly from a video of myself performing the line, but Steve’s feedback told me that the movement felt unnatural, and too complicated. I need to work on taking out even more poses than I already did in real life. I also think that the ‘rhythm’ of the animation is slightly off at the end when Jemma turns back to camera, so this is something `I will tweak.
I’m going to take some time over the break to watch/read/study some stuff on performance and timing in animation. I also ran the lip synchs past some of my friends currently working in industry for some feedback, and Ali let me know perhaps I needed to bring the pose changes forwards slightly so that they were in time with the ‘gaps’ in the lines.