Major Project: Personal [Pre Production] (Duel Dialogue)

The second part to the personal section of my major project is a Duel Dialogue piece. For this I had to find a 10 second sound clip with two people and then animate that. It took me a long time to find a good section of dialogue that I liked at also had different emotions and transitions of emotion. I didn't want to use a clip from 11 second club because I often look on that website and I didn't want my clip to have been animated to multiple times already. I didn't want to be influenced by ideas others had already come up with and I didn't want to compare mine with others that were animated bu much more experienced people then me.

I eventually narrowed my clips down to one. I really liked this one because I thought there was a lot of personality in each of their voices. I also liked there was both a male and female in this clip as I haven't really animated many females before. I think this clip will be difficult to lip sync to because of how fast they speak but I seem to always like the things that are hard. Hopefully I will be able to get it looking good and still readable.

First I needed to decide who my characters were, what they looked like and their personalities. I started off with some initial character sketches, I then developed the ones I liked most. After deicing which of these was my favorite I created a quick model sheet for them.

After deciding on my characters I moved onto the shot and actual animation and movement of the two. I did some quick sketches of ideas for the camera and character placement, I then went onto some initial blocking ideas. I just explored emotions driving the character in the scene.

After I decided on these I moved onto rough thumbs and animatics for the scene to experiment with their interaction and body movements. 

This really helped me visually see both characters interacting with one another and showed me what did and what didnt work. After I made my final set of thumbs and final animatic.

I wish I could have spent more time on my final animatic as I was not entirely happy with the drawing quality. I think it conveys the general idea of what I want to achieve in the scene but there are many subtle movements that couldn't be captured in a quick animatic. (Maybe I will put up my LAVs in the future as they are much closer to what I want the final animation to look like)

After I had decided on the movement I made some bar charts to break down the dialogue and lip sync. This will make it much easier for me to animate the lip sync in during production. 

Over all I was happy with my pre production work for the duel dialogue. It has got me really excited to animate these two characters as I feel like I know them. 

This is probably going to be my favorite part of my major project work because its very similar to what I would like to get into after university. I love character animation because it includes my love to drama and performance as well as animation. I cant wait to crack on with this and improve my character animation skills. I think this duel dialogue piece will be difficult, but I am the most excited for it so I hope it goes well.