For this project in a team we had to pick a voice recording and animate two characters mouthing the words. The idea was that the context of what was said would have been based on a news article or headline and what we choose to animate would extend this visually. To start of me and my partner generated and chose a sound file to animate:
Hearing the sound recording we chose we had the idea that the topic of ‘climate change’ would be a big part in the animation so jotted down animals which live in cold environments. We had stuck with the dynamic of a small happy penguin and a older more grumpy polar bear, this was because not only are polar bears are known to be losing their habitat due to the ice caps melting penguins are also a well known arctic creature so they would be recognizable as their species. Whilst exploring this we came up with the idea that these animals are in an enclosure (like that of a zoo) with the perspective focusing on their reaction to hearing “snow in California, Texas”, we felt it would be funny to see their ‘secret life’ as they go about their day with people visiting them.
To further see the depth of how serious the weather was for those living in Texas we looked at news and weather reports to see the scale:
https://www.nbcdfw.com/weather/how-much-snow-did-we-get-in-north-texas/2555349/
There had be countless stories ranging from people enjoying the snow to inside apartments freesing as many were left without power for the duration. Many social media posts were made with people seeing their indoor fans having icicles form as well as stated in the recording “a fishtank freezing over”. As shown in the news coverage above the city of “Gun brl” had experienced over 9.5″ off snow. Going of this research we had then moved onto develop the designs of the characters themselves.
With how extreme the weather had been we wanted to make the base character designs simple so that we can over exaggerate the expressions in response to say them reading about the latest weather report. I was in charge of designing the penguin, we had the idea that both characters would be a specific shape so that their design is readable no matter what position they’re in:
For the penguin I went with a soft rectangular shape, this was so it would contrast the big round shapes which the bear had (designed by my partner, Martin)
We had moved onto developing the concept and felt we needed to research how the animation could be taken,
Walk on the wild side, was a comedy talk show first shown on BBC one in 2009. It had three seasons and focused on animals and their lives, with voice overs done by many talented actors. We felt this fit into this project as the idea of this series was to create funny scenes from what animals do on a daily basis, giving the original footage a new context. Using the sound recording we chose in making our animatic, inspired by this we focused on ways we can exaggerate and create funny ways these characters would react and how they would pose themselves when talking.
We had also found the series “Creature comforts”, by aardman studios, featuring two seasons and started in 2003. Similarly to our project they had people prompted to talk about a topic and in turn they would animate their voices with animals. What inspired us about this was the way they had created animation from the dialogue with body movements such as the lion throwing their arms around as they were talking. We had then discussed ways we could take our dialogue such as: how would the bear act in this scene? would this character be shocked or excited in response? among other things, we had developed a narrative for the whole duration of the recording which we went into creating.
Using our story boarding notes and plans we had worked together to create the animatic, which we then moved into timing and breaking down our shots. Dividing our overall animation up ( around thirteen scenes each) I had begun working on the body animations:
What I had trouble with was making each scene feel alive, I felt that whilst there would be a pause in most scenes such as a character not speaking or just repeating a pose it felt jarring that they would literally be still. The way I overcame this was by redrawing parts of the frame so that it would have a fuzzy texture so even though they were ‘still’ they would still feel and look alive.
I had then moved onto the lip syncing of the animation. Using a reference of phonetic sounds and how the mouth would look I had translated these into my scenes so that it matched the way the sounds are said and how.