Transcripts
1. [NEW] Introduction: Speech is culture,
personality, life. If you want to breathe life into your animated characters, you came to the right place. Hello, I am Vera. I am an animator and
illustrator from Germany. A lot of the inspiration for my art comes from
everything role-playing, like LARP events
and lots of D&D. For these kinds of
role-playing games, it's essential to create
believable characters. I give my character
depth and dimension by looking on the inside
and asking myself, what kind of experiences formed this person and how does
this show to the outside? Besides obvious
visible elements, a lot of it is attitude and how they talk and
interact with others. You will learn in
this class how to apply this to an
animated character. The steps we will take
together will go beyond the technical and straight to the core of speech
and body language. What are you doing? No real person talks like that, or maybe they do, but then I would assume that something terrible
has happened to them. What are you doing? Our tone, body language, and facial expression
convey a lot of meaning. What are you doing? We analyze different ways of
saying this one sentence. Each will highlight
a different aspect of the individual's mood and mannerism and how these are displayed in gestures
and facial expressions. We'll begin with
an introduction to acting principles
so you understand a little better how
to put meaning and personality into the
way somebody speaks. We'll go over understanding
words more like shapes and sound bits
rather than their spelling. Also, what makes a character unique despite
generic mouth shapes. It's time to look at what
makes them different. Do they show their teeth? What does the face do
when they're speaking, then when you get into
lip syncing itself. I'll be doing this in Photoshop. But this is not a software
class so feel free to use whatever tools you
feel comfortable with. While some knowledge
about animation or illustration can certainly
be an advantage here, I would still recommend
this class to anybody of intermediate level or beginners with a burning curiosity
for moving lines. No matter if you're a
hobbyist or a professional, learning more about animation will give you a
new understanding of character design,
storytelling, and dimensions. To make everything easier,
checkout my resources. You could make your
own character design or you get straight to
animating and just use mine. By the end of this course, you'll be able to apply any line of dialogue
to any character. I'm looking forward to
meeting new characters with attitude in
the class project. Let's go on this adventure.
2. Class Project: Class project; level up your art by taking along. Animation can seem a bit daunting. I know that from experience. But I myself found that once you get started, it's actually not that hard. I hope you will have to same revelation. I will guide you into it in the following lessons, and would like to invite you to follow the steps with me and apply them as we go. What I would love to see in your class project is the following: A character design suited for animation. This can be of an original character of yours that you want to bring to life, or you can use the provided briefing to follow in my footsteps. Please don't be shy to include your sketches, expression sheets, and gesture drawings too. A sheet of mouth shapes, either in a generic form that shows how you approach the simplification, or mouth shapes that are a model for your character design. An animated lip sync. This can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. You can animate a simple smiley face as an exercise, or your character in all their glory. Pick what feels challenging but accomplishable to you. Feel free to use one of the provided voice-overs or record a line of your own. I would like you to feel encouraged and hived for this challenge. I'm 100 percent sure that you can do it. Taking every step of the way might feel hard, but it will give you a great feel of accomplishment in the end. Be structured about your approach, look at reference, take breaks, and most importantly, have fun. In the first lesson, we will start by creating a character design for animation.
3. Character Design: Character design, how to approach it from an animation standpoint. Before we jump into the nitty-gritty stuff, we will need a character to breathe life into. You can use a character of your own, that you already have created, or you can start from scratch. My design will be based on the same character I used in my first Skillshare class about animation, which you can find linked in the description. This briefing is optional for you to follow along with. The character is a goblin girl. She often lurks in the shadows and might scare people with her rugged animalistic looks and ferociousness but she is lovable and kind at heart. It is always good to look for reference. I like to go on Google or Pinterest and just smash in some direct associations I have in my head, and then I collect what comes up. In this case, I typed in Goblin, eight-year-old girl, rogue, angry cat, stuff like that. With a point of reference to stat from, you can jump into sketching out your ideas. But hold your horses, this is going to be for animation. I have a couple of pointers for you, that will help you throughout this course to take along. These are a few key principles that I like to remind myself of. Solid drawing, this means, try to shift the way of thinking from flat shapes to 3D forms, and always think of volume, weight, and balance. Start thinking of your character's body as a series of simple forms in three-dimensional space, and break it down to understand it better. If you follow its surface with lines you can find its shape and mass rather than just focusing on the outlines. Build your character out of spheres, boxes, and cylinders instead of circles, squares and triangles, it will give it a lot more depth. Try to move away from symmetry in your design, and always remember, volume, weight and balance. This will make your work much more lively and appealing. Appeal. This doesn't mean that all your characters have to be attractive, it means that they should be interesting to look at. Give your characters a dynamic design with elements that support their personality. They will not apply to every person standard of appeal but that is not the goal. The main point is, that they should fulfill their purpose in the context that you created them for. Here are a few tips on how to do that. Built your character with a variety of shapes. Don't use the same build for every new character. Embrace what makes each of them interesting, charismatic, and unique by pushing and exaggerating their shapes. Play around with proportions. The wonderful thing about animation is, that it doesn't have to portrait reality one-to-one, it reflects reality, and the design that is based in reality tends to be more relatable. The key is to find aspects that define or support your character's personality and to enhance them, to make them more appealing and interesting. Last but not least, keep it simple. Over complicating a design will make it harder to read and also super time consuming to draw. You will have to animate that, and if you have to move every single line you will, and trust me on this, curse yourself for every extra line that you have drawn in this desire. Think really hard if that extra button is really essential to the design or if making it fewer but bigger buttons might not be the better or smarter idea. I'm starting out with my own character design for this character. There was also for animation, but since this has a different focus the design has to be adjusted a bit to fit my needs better. I analyzed my work, and took some notes about what I saw as problematic or not working too well and what I liked about the general design. Then I started to play around with the shapes and design. I fixed a few little issues and went ahead to figure out details. The little goblin likes to hide her face so people don't get too scared, but really do I need this in lip sinking? That's a dumb thought, Vera. Very redundant to put a mask on this character. I focused a lot more on what was happening underneath the hood. You can see me using different colors for different elements. This helps me to separate them later on when I use the model as a reference in my animation. You can see I kept the overall shapes very close to the original design but I fixed a few issues with body parts connecting in weird manners, and I figured out how the character looks with the hood off. My main point though, was to have a mouth that gives me a bit more options when it comes to speaking, it is a lot bigger now. Once I'm happy with my design, I save it as a JPEG or a PNG so I can use it as reference in my animation process. I would love to see your character sketches, reference sheet, and final design in your class project. To summarize, take an existing design as starting point or use the briefing. Keep in mind, draw shapes with depth, balance, and weight instead of just shapes. Create your character with a specific purpose in mind. Break things down into simple forms, and hence, aspects of your design to make it more appealing. Don't be scared to change things. Keep it simple. In the next lesson I will talk a bit about acting.
4. Acting Principles: Acting principles. Every human action has a purpose. Putting words into a character's mouth is just one part of the deal. I will get to that. But let me talk about acting for a moment. We as human beings are empathetic creatures; our reactions are always the automatic response of our values and experiences. When somebody talks to us, we don't stare at their mouth in order to better hear what the words are they are saying, no, we perceive the person in front of us, analyze their body language and facial expression in order to put everything into a bigger context. To understand and convey this is our job as the animator. We don't have a goal to be the actor ourselves because we might focus too much on the physical action aspect. Our goal is to be an empathetic director, understand the character's objective and emotional response in this moment, and move their body and face in a manner that shows the thought. We got to figure out what we need the character to tell rather than just say. The personality of your character also plays a role in that. It will determine how strong their visual emotional responses are, if they move in big motions or rather limited ones, and if they, for instance, try to conceal that through reactions. If you study people in your life and consciously try to understand their actions and reactions, it will help you greatly to improve your skills to translate these onto your animated characters. Acting displays just a very selective and condensed part of real life. But it will make your character more relatable, more believable when their actions are based in real life. To summarize, acting is behaving believably in pretend circumstances for a theatrical purpose. Have the character think visibly, don't focus on the doing. Body language and facial expressions convey a lot of meaning. The character's values and thus their personality, will determine the automatic response or emotion to an obstacle or conflict. Next up, written versus spoken word.
5. Speech and Phrasing: Speech and phrasing, the music of conversation. Every person has their unique way of speaking. Some speak slow, some speak fast, some speak very loud, some speak very quiet, some show their teeth while they're talking, and some barely move their mouth. Take me, for example, I don't move my mouth a lot when I am speaking because I'm a lazy German. Our language doesn't really require much mouth and tongue effort. Speaking English a lot is actually quite exhausting for me. In every case though, we have one thing in common. We all open our mouth on vowels and close it on consonants. This means there isn't one right way to display a character's lip movement. It is all about hitting the right vowels and consonants to make things feel legit. Maybe you've seen one of those videos out there, where somebody took a famous piece of movie and put a new voice over on it. Very often this alternative text is total mumbo jumbo and doesn't make much sense other than being actual words. You know fish can hear you thinking just before you sneeze. Chubby, chuff, chap. Who was chubby, chuff, chap? But it works because they're hitting the right vowels and consonants. It looks and feels right. Don't over-complicate things for yourself for this. I know it can feel a bit daunting, but really the most part of it is just intuition and observation. Speaking is a lot like music. We slur over parts and emphasize others and compose something that makes sense as a whole. But just like you don't necessarily hear every note that is written on the sheet music, you don't hear every part of the words that are spoken. We don't pronounce every syllable perfectly. Try to think in word shapes and sounds rather than words. Sometimes they leak into each other. Sometimes there's a break in the middle of one word that you wouldn't expect or an emphasis that overshadows the rest. This is what's referred to as phrasing in this context. Anyways, let me cover a universal basis for you that will help you understand lip sinking principles in general, so you can take these and bend them to your needs. To summarize, keep calm and remember phrasing. Vowels; mouth open, consonants; mouth closed. As long as you hit the big word shapes, you are golden. In the next lesson, I will talk about how to put this to action.
6. Mouth Shapes: Mouth shapes, the first steps for your actual lip sync animation. Now that you know what to focus on in the sounds you wanted to display, let us look at how to actually display mouth shapes. I will go through a couple of the most common shapes and give you a few examples of in which sound context I would actually use them. This is not going to be focused on styles specifically. It's more like a general way of simplifying mouth shapes. I will go into details on styles and such in the next lesson. These shapes are focused to emphasize what specific elements do, teeth, jaw, tongue. If you want, take notes as sketches for each of the shapes and make them your own. Our tongue of course, plays a very big role in speaking, but we actually don't see it that often. The tongue can be seen a bit when it goes up behind the teeth for sounds like in needle, dart, love, and trend. This mouth shape is used for long O and U sounds. The lips basically form the sound they are making and we see the tongue a little bit in the back. Use the shape for sounds like in towed, cone, dude, or brews. We have the short O sound that is displayed with an open mouth. The jaw slightly more extended, when it pops out that sound. It can be found in words like auger, oxygen, shop, and box. This mouth shape is probably the most used one because it is used for short vowels such as in apple, elephant, Internet, up. This shape is used for long E sounds. You see the teeth but there's a gap. Use it for sounds as in deep, beer, or real. The closed mouth position is used to visualize sounds like in bomb, mob or proud. Another very often used position is this one with the teeth closed, as used for many consonants like in cider, dark, cheese, gender, justice, normal, sad, sheet, turtle, Zorro. A sound that is very specific and important to the English language, and a nightmare to many other nationalities, especially Germans is this one. It covers words like thief, bath, or three. This one is fun for sounds like a phone, fox, veil, vote. We clench our bottom lip a tiny bit with the teeth. It's fun to exaggerate. The R sound can be varied. Either use an open mouth with both upper and lower row of teeth showing, the bottom jaw pulled back a bit, or go with under bite for a bit more exaggerated display of the sound. This is used for sounds like in rocket, fork or rabbit. This is probably the smallest our lips will get when we pull them together into sounds like in quiet, cute, or weak. The L sound has the tongue touching the roof of our mouth behind the teeth like in lemon, pillow, ball. This mouth shape is optional because we can replace it in most cases with one of the other shapes. But in specific cases, this will give you a better result. For instance, in words like karma or gallon. It's an open mouth with the upper teeth showing. The lips are pulled a bit wider than for the short vowels. As you can see, these drawings are very exaggerated and simplified. Now, looking at my wonderful reference videos, you probably noticed that not all example words were the best choice for the respective shape and question. Some sounds slurred over the one that was going to be the focus of the example. Always keep in mind, context is key. Remember also that people need to breathe. This doesn't always happen with an open mouth. Searching for words, hesitating and stammering also need a shape. Observing people talk or filming yourself speaking will help you to apply these things to animation. If you made your own reference sheet for mouth shapes, please remember to add it to your class project and share it with us. To summarize. A word alone does not make the sound, it means the context of the sentence. Exaggerate and simplify. Keep in mind to define the unspoken elements too. In the next lesson, I will give you some tips how you can personalize and define your character speaking.
7. Characteristical Speaking: Characteristical speaking, unique to every character. Now that we have a starting point, I would like to elaborate a bit on the design aspects. As I mentioned, everybody has their unique way of speaking. That does not only apply to the sounds that they're making, it also applies to the general face, and especially the mouth area. First of all, you'd always want to consider the mood of the character, and ask yourself how it reflects in their face. A happy person might smile, the corners of their mouth pulled up. An angry character would probably have a very exaggerated mouth movement, depending on their personality. If they would try to repress the emotion, the mouth could be very tense and small, or they let go, and it happens the opposite. The mouth gets very big and loose. Remember that animation allows you to do things that are not possible in reality. Not only in terms of exaggerating forms and shapes, also in terms of, for instance, teeth. For my design, I wanted the character to have this one big tooth. This would be visible 99 percent of the time. But what about the other teeth? Some people show just their upper or lower row of teeth, and some people don't have teeth. I decided to give my character teeth and specific expressions, or rather, remove all but the tusk in certain moments. They are a storytelling element, and emphasize her ferociousness. It gives her a certain animalistic element. Think about these things when you take the generic mouth shapes to bring them on model for your character. I accidentally stumbled upon this video by Mary Elizabeth Kelly on TikTok. She demonstrates very well how the mouth can change the whole character. Here are even more actors who act with their mouths. No Mr. Schnibley, I'd rather us talk in the principal's office. Do you really want to know, mom? Garanteche, the pants. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. I'm Batman. You shall die. No, I'm the youngest. Big mistake, big, huge mouth candy. I find this to be quite a good inspiration because it demonstrates in great variety the usage of the general mouth area, the face and teeth when people are speaking. If you want, you can add a sheet with specific mouth shapes and expressions for your own character to the class project, and show us a bit of your thought process. To summarize, find out what is unique about the way your character talks. Your animation, your freedom. Go nuts and do what you feel makes sense. Think about teeth. Keep in mind emotions. The next lesson, we'll teach you some quite technical but important things about our perception.
8. Seeing and Hearing: Seeing and hearing. A few technical tips and insights and how we as human beings perceive things. Before we get to the actual lip syncing and animation part, I need to talk a little bit about science. I'm sorry, don't be scared. It's not that bad. In science, we learn that light travels faster than sound. For instance, when you're watching fireworks, you can see the lights before you hear the sound or in a thunderstorm, you can see the lightning before you actually hear the rumble. The time passing between the lightning and the rumble actually can tell you how far away it is. As a scout, I learned that when you count the seconds between the lightning and the rumble, and you divide that number by three, you get the distance to the thunderstorm in kilometers. Sound and light are both waves that our brain perceives as vibration traveling at significantly different speed through air and thus it categorizes them as two different things. While sound waves rely on the air as a medium, light doesn't really need the air to be transported, which makes it incredibly much faster. The reason behind that is because matter is sluggish, the thing that travels through the air, it's just so much slower because it is slowed down by the particles. Light however, just shoots through, doesn't care. This means our brain is spoiled and it takes things way more serious when it has visual proof before hearing something. What does that mean for animation? It just means that our spoiled brain is used to seeing before hearing. That's why when we're animating a lip syncing, we have to move the animation a little bit ahead of the audio. Not much, it's just about 2-4 frames maybe but it helps our brain to accept that the things that we see are lined up with what we are hearing. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. For instance, when your character is speaking and saying something that ends on a closed mouth position, like mom, you have to align these sounds with the animation, otherwise, you will have the sound carrying over after the mouth already closed, it would just look really weird. Mom, you rock. Or if somebody is clapping, you try to hit the beats of the clap exactly in your animation because otherwise it would feel off. Whatever you're doing when you're animating, you can either animate perfectly on the beats and then move it ahead or you plan your animation from the get-go accordingly 2-4 frames ahead and put down the beats on spot for the fore mentioned cases. If you go by the first way, we have to fill these in after the fact and you might ruin your timing. Don't be scared. Also, our brains are always a little bit ahead. That means we are breathing in before we're speaking. We are forming O shapes with our mouth before the sound is coming out and stuff like that. Keep these little things in mind when you're animating a lip sync to make your animation feel a bit more real and life-like. That's my scientific explanation. There you go. To summarize, we're seeing before hearing. Move your animation a little bit ahead of your audio. Hit the closed mouth positions on the beat, hit sudden noises on the beat, and anticipate sounds in your animation like breathing in and shaping your mouth for sounds. In the next lesson, I will introduce some audio samples. Let's go.
9. Voiceover Sampling: Voiceover sampling, one line and a few moods to choose from. You probably have an idea already for your animation of what you would like your character to say, that is great. But in case you don't, I have recorded a couple of examples for you of a line with ambiguous content, but with different emotional connotations to it. Let me show you a few examples of how you could get started with this, and then I will move on to a line that I pick to animate. Please note, if you want, you can solely focus on the expressions and lip movements. I included some posing too, so my sketches have an aspect of physical action in them to support the two, but this is totally up to you. Amused. Hi, what are you doing there? This one felt amused and a bit confident or even snotty. Her pose is very relaxed, maybe she was focused on something else and looks up to see whatever. She's curious but also a bit cheeky in how the line comes across. Angry. Hi, what are you doing there? The line has a lot of tension here. Her body's movement and face express this with stiff limbs, bold movements, and very intense look on her face. This character is up for confrontation. Neutral or happy. Hi, what are you doing there? This is the most neutral version of this line. She could be happy or just curious. I added a bit of quiet observation before she decides to ask the question. Sad, disappointed, or demotivated. Hi, what are you doing? She is feeling a bit down in this variation, something waits on her and she's broody, sitting on the ground. Her attention gets caught but there is not a lot of interest, so we get a bit of a mellow reaction. Skeptical or curious, two versions. What are you doing there? In the first version, she's very direct and inquisitive. Her tone sounds almost accusing, and she feels a bit like a mom who saw her kid doing something they shouldn't do. Hi, what are you doing? The second version is both curious and skeptical. There's a lot more carefulness in her demeanor. Surprised, confused, curious. Hi, but what are you doing? With a little hesitant in there, she displays not only surprise and curiosity, but also confusion. I love using their ears to support the conflicting emotions in her voice and her clueless facial expression. Disgusted. Hi, oh, what are you doing there? She sounds like she walked in on something she really didn't expect to and probably also didn't want to see. The happy and relaxed face quickly changes to shock, then disgust, and then she leans back, repelled by whatever she's confronted with. I love the variety of emotion she go through here so this is the line I pick to animate. If you want, you can record your own audio for this. You can just use your phone or use your computer with programs like QuickTime or Audacity. This could be a greeting, happy birthday, or a compliment to a friend. To summarize, use one of the provided lines or record your own audio. Hint, the longer the line, the more transitions and acting opportunities. But keep it under 5-6 seconds, it's already a lot. In the next lesson, I will show you how I set up a file for animation in Photoshop.
10. Setting Up: Setting up directions for animating in Photoshop. I hope you chose a line of dialogue for you to animate now. You can tag along with me to sketch out the rough story poses or expressions in the next lesson. Before we get to that though, I will show you the setup that I will be working in. I will be animating in Photoshop, but you can use whatever tool works best for you. Alternatives for animation could be Clip Studio Paint, Toon Boom Harmony, or Procreate on the iPad Pro. The last one doesn't support audio on both though, so it would require you to get a bit creative. All right first things first, start up Photoshop. Create a new Canvas. I picked the standard video format; 1,920 by 1,080 but you can really go with whatever you want for your animation. Now, to get the right setup for our animation, you need to enable the timeline under Window and then click on "Create Timeline". This will give you a timeline of your layers as frames. If you want your background to be there throughout the whole time, make sure that this frame stretches over the whole timeline. Underneath the drawing layers is a layer for audio. Just click on that little note symbol to impart the audio you would like to use in your animation. This will also give you an indication of how long your background layer should expand. If you need a better overview over your timeline, you can drag this little arrow down here. On the one side, it will show you a detailed view of a few frames, and at the other side, it will display the whole timeline. Next important thing, set your frame rate. Traditionally, this would be 24 frames per second for hand-drawn animation. Our brains are able to perceive something as a motion from eight frames per second up. If you want to reduce your animation, take this as a challenge. Creating a new layer will give you a very long duration per default. I like to adjust the empty layer to a length of two frames and by dragging it to the new layer button, I duplicate it. Then I'll repeat it until I have a bunch of two frame long layers that I can use. If you drag the layer in your timeline next to another one, it will pile them into a video group. This can make the overview a bit better, but for the beginning, I'm usually keeping things separate under normal groups. You can see here that I have some fancy controls panels above my timeline. I have linked the sources of these in the description. They are not essential though, but they can make your life a bit easier. Once you have all of this setup, you can get started. To summarize, create a digital Canvas in the size of your choosing. Set up the timeline. Make sure to set the frames per second to 24. In the next lesson, we will get into animation. Let's go.
11. Rough Animation: Rough animation, laying down the foundation. Yes, we finally get to the animation part. Grab a beverage and settle in. This will be a long one. You now have all the tools in hand to make your own lip-syncing animation. If you want, you can keep it super simple and animate a floating head or a smiley face if you just want to go and practice lip syncing or you choose boss mode. This will include the character's torso or even whole body and might involve things like acting with the whole figure, complex movements and appendages that move co-dependently. Choose what feels comfortable with you and focus on enjoyment, please. The process of animation can take a lot of time and I want you to feel a sense of accomplishment after tackling this, not frustration. My example includes the character's body and I will be keeping my explanations generally applicable. You can apply them to your work no matter what you choose. First thing I did was fetch a picture of the waveform of my audio. You can display this representation of the audio with many programs. I used Audacity, which is a free audio editing tool. I just took a screenshot of the waveform and put that into my Photoshop canvas. This helps me to understand the audio beats, the length of pauses, and over relation of the sentence. Hi, what are you doing there? Taking my sketches from the former lesson as an inspiration, I knew roughly what I was going for. I also recorded myself acting the scene out. I then start with key poses. This allows me to keep the overall motion in mind. I don't get stuck on details and see how my vision works. This also allows me to make quick changes without having to rework too much if I notice in this stage that the feeling with this posing is off. Key poses are meant to convey the main story beats of your motion. With the audio as a guide, it is a bit easier to determine what and where your key poses should be. I remember that I was totally lost when I started out with animation because the concept of storytelling poses was a bit too abstract for me. How should I know when, what happens, I wondered. Well, that's the thing. You just decide it. Having reference footage, timing actions in your everyday life, and just getting a feeling for how long things take will help you. Don't despair, it all takes practice. Once I'm happy with my key poses, I add rough mouth positions to the frames as a mental note. Going through the audio, I try to nail down the most important beats. Hi gets a big open mouth representing this big vowel. Also, the character is happy for now. I also added transition into the unhappy ew. I chose the mouth shape with more exposed teeth. This really emphasizes the wild side of the character. The following transition was a shot in the dark because I was not entirely sure how I wanted this to play out, but that's okay. Also, the initial shape of this part of the sentence was not yet quite where I wanted it to hit. I actually ended up changing a couple of these shapes during my rough animation and my cleanup phase. But what was there from the start was an emphasis on the are you and I use the pose for R with the extended bottom jaw. This also nicely underlines the tooth action. What remained as well was the tongue peeking out for there in the end. Then I start refining the key poses by adding the mouth, eyes, nose, and ears to the character. Side note, I recommend keeping things that are separate from the main body for later, such as hair and clothing. They move co-dependently to the main body's motion. Focus on the shape and masses of your character itself first. Now, as you remember, the timeline is set to give us 24 frames per second. That would make a total of 120 pictures for a five-second animation. That is quite a lot. Ain't nobody got time for that. But luckily, our brain is unable to distinguish all of these single pictures anyways, so we can cheat it a bit. We will be working on twos. That means one picture per two frames. Keep this in mind as we are moving on. I'm filling in the drawings between my key poses now. Notice these lines here on the side with numbers and strokes on them? These are called timing charts. They help me to plan my breakdown position and in-between, so all the pictures that will connect the key poses. The number on top is the one I'm starting out on. The one on the bottom is the one I am working into. This means that the line represents a portion of time passing that can be of varying length depending on how far apart the key poses are in time. The position of the horizontal strokes simulate how close to the former or latter frame the drawing on this position and time is. To get an organic movement, I often cushion the start and end of a motion. This is called slow in and slow out. More drawings means slower movement, less drawings, faster movement. You often can see a stroke in the dead center or on one of the thirds of a line, which usually represents what is referred to as the breakdown. I work myself from key pose to key pose via this middle position. It can be closer to one or the other key position. That always depends on the motion. Once these are established, I go straight ahead from already established poses and jump back and forth between the drawings that will fill up the motion. While I'm working and not only scrubbing the play head through my drawings to see how they work in action, I'm also using the so-called Onion Skin. You can enable it by clicking on this icon in the top right of your timeline bar and find it in the pop-up menu. The Onion Skin settings allow you to define the range of frames you would like to see. Onion Skin enabled then shows you frames before and after the one you are currently drawing on. As I'm drawing, I'm always keeping in mind the important principles of animation for a lively and fun action. Squashing and stretching the masses is very relevant to give a face certain realness. Opening the jaw results in a more stretch shape and squinting makes the face squash. You can go really crazy with this. Play around with the squishiness of flesh. Big motions are usually initiated with an anticipation. This means that the body part will charge up energy for a short moment, moving into the opposite direction before going into the intended motion. For instance, bending your legs before you jump. I will also add a bit of overshoot along the way, which is basically the opposite of anticipation. The element that reaches its final position will overshoot the goal a little bit and then settle back into it. This should get a bit clearer as we move along with the animation. Once I have established the rough body motion and facial expressions I want my little goblin to go through, I'm moving on to add hair and clothing. As you can see, I decided to leave a big hood off, the hair and clothes move with the body but are usually dragging behind a bit and are a tiny bit offset. So once the head moves down, the hair will remain in the last position for a few frames before following the motion of the body. It will also follow through after the body has come to a halt, swing a little bit before it comes to a rest. Same goes for the clothing. Keep the material of your appendages in mind as you animate. The heavier the material, the slower and more sluggish it will react. The lighter it is, the more easily it will move with the main body. Here is the final rough animation. Hi, what are you doing there? You can see that I stayed very rough and loose. I did not define everything and often only laid out landmarks of the body or clothing that seemed important to me in a stage. You can work as loose or as refined as you would like to. I think as long as you are not relying on somebody else to finalize your animation, there is no harm to it. Only you need to be able to understand and work with it along the way. So just have fun. To summarize, including your audio's waveform can help you time your animation and keep an overview. Decide what your animation will include. If you work with a body of your character to the big key poses first, work big to small. Decide on the most important mouth positions and note them down. Once you have your key poses, add the details like the face. Add transitioning poses to fill up the motion. Timing charts can help you to plan out your actions. Add appendages like hair and clothing only after you have figured out your main body's motion. Remember the following. Squash and stretch, anticipation, drag, follow through, overshoot, and slow in and slow out. Let's move on to the cleanup and coloring.
12. Cleanup, Color and Export: Clean up, color and export, tying things down. This next part of the animation process can take another varying length of eternity. Please note that my way does absolutely not have to be your way. You could, for instance, have a very loose and fun style in mind and maybe your rough animations are already so tight and working well that you can just call it dunsies. That is totally up to you. I, however, am an insufferable nitpicky perfectionist and this reflects in my clean animation. You might see me redrawing lines a billion times in this lesson. Drawing one frame often took me over half an hour, so please don't do the math. I want to encourage you to find a way of animating that is fun to you and that might be very different from my approach. But again, my advice and guides throughout this lesson should still be applicable to your work. Let's jump in. To keep my Photoshop files at a reasonable size, I first export my rough animation as a video. Go over to the dropdown menu under File, click "Export," and select "Render Video" at the very bottom. In the window popping up, you can determine the file location and name as well as format, size and many other things. I use H264 and don't really touch anything else. Once rendered, you can drag the video into another animation file you set up and it will be placed as a smart object. Now, I can start cleaning up. What I like to do is, have the character design up somewhere so I can look at it at all times. I get started with a frame that I felt was representative of the character and not like a weird transition or something. This frame will also return as a reference later on. You might see it every now and then on low opacity while I work on other frames. This helps me to keep [inaudible] relations and masses in mind. For the cleanup, I also stick with a mix of pose to pose and straight ahead animation in order to keep everything consistent. I hardly ever do, for instance, frame 50 and then directly do frame 52. There will always be a back and forth between frames that are usually 8-16 frames apart for a start and then I will work on the ones in between, just like I explained in the former lesson. Another thing I do is change of working on one frame in specific and on one body part or detail. It is easy to lose track of the masses of elements. Sometimes I would focus solely on the ears, for example, and clean this up for a couple of frames. This way, I don't get lost in details and can really focus on the motion. An element I, for some reason, didn't add in my rough animation was the hood. I think I wanted to move things along, so it was mostly laziness. Working with it now in the clean animation though, was not as easy as I was hoping. The cloth falls in so many places, the big flap was moving more than anticipated with the arms and I forgot the hood part swinging behind the body at times. But it worked out fine in the end. I can only recommend to at least note down important parts of these elements before you finalize your lines. Let's look at my file here. I have worked mostly on twos as mentioned before. Each picture is exposed for two frames but somewhere along these lines I change to ones for a part. This was a choice I made for this very fast change. The choice to go on ones was to emphasize the change from happy to disgusted and it made the whole motion a bit smoother. This is another thing where no approach is right or wrong. Some people might even animate all on ones. If you want to do that, do it. Nobody can stop you. I just like to make a use of combinations of ones and twos. So just try things and find out what works best for your specific work. Also, she realizes something in this very moment and this thought is supported by the blink I put in here. People blink to keep their eyes from drying out. This happens roundabout every four seconds. All other blinks or lack of, usually indicates something happening inside the person's head. Just think of nervous blinking or being so concentrated that you stare. Lastly, I want to emphasize that there is no shame in copying your frames. If only parts change in a period of time, just copy and paste the rest. Work smart, not hard. Once I'm satisfied with the cleanup animation, I once again export it as a video. But before we go into coloring, let me point a couple of things out. Arcs, arcs should always play a big role in your animation. See how all elements form arcs with the movement. Breaking these invisible arcs in your motion will break the smoothness and give your animation a hiccup. See the overshoot of the arms as she stops. Remember that things have mass and will stop at different rates. Same goes for the hair and sleeves following through on the motion and the earring that also drags behind. You can also nicely see the [inaudible] of the frames towards beginnings and ends of motion, slowing in and slowing out. Let's look at the mouth shapes and slow this down a bit. Hi, hello, what are you doing there? The offset of picture and sound is a bit better recognizable like this. Notice the transitions I made. The mouth goes from the big happy shape to a wide disgusted expression. The teeth show clearly. Once she's leaning away, her mouth also turns to be a lot smaller in the expressions, a bit pressed and under tension. All elements are there to support the main idea. In order to color the animation, I once again take the formerly exported clean up and place it in my Photoshop file as a smart object by drag and drop. I then create trends according to the animation by using the Magic Wand to select the white around my figure and pressing shift and command and I. I select her form in this frame. Sometimes the Lasso tool needs to help clean up the selection a bit and then I fill it with a flat color. I chose this skin tone for this purpose. This is the first step. Do it for every frame of your animation. Then I activate the Alpha lock for each frame so I can paint into the colored areas only, without painting over lines outside the character. Once again, I'm sure there's a billion ways to do this, but this is how I work. If you want to enlighten us all with your personal favorite approach, please drop it in the comments. Now, I'm going through the frames time and time again to color in the single elements in their respective hue. When I chose the colors in my character design process, I paid special attention to the colors values. So how light or dark they are in relation. Choosing colors of varying values will help to visually distinguish parts. You can enable a proof setup to see your work in black and white as you can see here. Now that I have everything colored nicely, I add simple shading to every frame to give it more depth. All of this is, of course, totally optional for you. I chose a nice dark purplish gray, the layers set to multiply and an opacity of 40 percent. These layers are set to clip to my grouped color layers. Each shading frame only applies their content to the pixels that are already colored. One last and final time, export your video via File, Export, Render Video and we are done. Hi, hello, what are you doing there? To summarize, you do you? My way is not law, but I hope it inspires you. Choose how loose or clean you want to work. Export rough animation as a video to place in a new file as a smart object. Start with a frame you feel depicts your character well. Have your character design present to use as reference. Jump around to keep an overview of masses, motions, and details. Change up your process if you get stuck. Remember the key principles of animation. Work smart, not hard. Export cleanup as a video to move on to coloring. Use Magic Wand and Lasso for fast and clean selections. Make use of Alpha lock and clipping. Add shading to your liking. Buy yourself a cake to celebrate. You did it.
13. Conclusion: Congratulations, adventurer. This sure was a lot of input and you made it to the very end. We created a character, learned about acting and speaking, and most importantly, created a living, breathing, and talking animation. I think it's one of the most magical experiences to see your own work come to life and talk, even if it's a bit weird when it's your own voice. I hope you learned a lot about how human beings act and speak, and how to apply these to your own moving lines. This certainly was a challenge and you should be proud of yourself. I can't wait to see all of your projects and would like to encourage you to also add work in progress or unfinished things. I would love to see them. If there are any open questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you so much for your company. Until next time, bye.
Vera Rehaag, Freelance Artist
