Character animation complete

I think this is 9 weeks behind my original schedule.

Nevertheless, it is something to be glad about.

Upcoming: scanning, colouring, backgrounds, shadows, cards & leaves & blanket animation, foley, in order of priority.
Yes, I am terrible.

Animating the laugh

As the only piece in my animation that I was syncing to audio, animating the laugh posed a couple of new challenges I guess. I had a rough idea in my mind of viewing the audio as a waveform and writing down the timings of bits, and then maybe roughly testing out the timing of some keyposes, but which software? Doing it directly in Photoshop was my first preference, but although you could bring in audio, there was no way to view the waveforms, so it lacked the precision I was after. Next I tried Premiere Pro and Flash. Premiere was irksome, and I never liked it anyway, so I gave up on that. Flash would have been ok, except the recording was a bit on the quiet side, and so the waveforms were invisible. There seemed to be a limited way of resizing the timeline, plus I couldn't get the audio to play, so I ditched that and went to Audition, which was the logical first choice, come to think of it. So I ended up using Audition to find the exact time I wanted, then timing it out in Photoshop.

I had only a faint idea of how laughs really went, taking them all for granted as it were, so Youtube came into handy there. Although most of the footage tagged with my search terms were of babies, I could see that, contrary to prior assumption, the mouth did not really change shape with each syllable, and head bobbing was minor. I chose to accentuate the head and shoulder movement (exaggeration, booyah), and moreover recalled the use of a figure 8 motion path for the animation of a laugh in one of them books I read; most likely  the Animator's Survival Kit. I haven't consciously done that figure 8 thing yet so I thought it'd be good to give it a try.

Now I just need to get all this information down on paper. Which will take ages. Which I might not even get done this week because I have another assignment due. Which sucks because I am SO CLOSE to finishing all the character animation for this thing. 

2 MORE SHOTS!

Laugh

The sound component is coming along, if not amazingly. Music is the most done, with Nick coming in to work on it every week, foley I am still putting off as much as possible. Good news however, is I have laughs! Susan kindly organised for me to record her son who is about the right age (and ridiculously adorable to boot). It took me a while to whittle down and mix and match the audio (which mostly consisted of us trying to make him laugh) to a reasonably believable continuous laugh sequence. It didn't help that he had this (ridiculously adorable) sarcastic laugh going most of the time which was short and I could only use the beginning of. Short laughs have a different quality to long laughs I found.