'READY TO PARTEYYYYYY'

Ready To Party - 2D Dialogue and Character Animation 

Overview:

This was a project set by my university in which the task was to create an 11 second character animation with dialogue of our choice. This project introduced us to lip syncing in 2D animation and character expressions/acting. 

Here you can see my final outcome:

PLANNING

Before I began working on this project my first step was to preselect a 11 second dialogue to animate to. This is what I would use to inspire and plan everything surrounding this short animatic, from character design to storyboarding. I had searched for a voice clip on the '11 second club' website that excited me, which ended up being a plane scene from bridesmaids. I thought I could made this clip funny in my own style because as soon as I heard it I had imagined a girl getting ready for a party in her pyjamas or towel jumping around the house pre drinking from a bottle of wine or champagne. 

My next step was to design this character. I wanted to make it simple, referencing a traditional stop motion TV show animation style. In the end I chose to draw the female character in a towel around her body and her hair, holding a bottle of wine and a cigarette with very big eyelashes. 

After my character design came storyboarding. Due to the time constraint I decided to focus more on the lip-syncing and the character itself rather than drawing a background. I decided to have a plain background with changing colours to demonstrate a party theme just to add a bit of something but I wanted the character to be the centre piece. I decided to keep the lady in the middle of the screen at all times with a few cuts, zooming in and out, which I demonstrated in the storyboard. I did stick with the original plan in mind with only a few minor changes as the animation process went on. 

Both the storyboard and character design can be seen below:

CHARACTER DESIGN:

STORYBOARDING:

PROCESS

With the storyboarding finished, I had chosen to go with a hand drawn approach to animation and not use Toonboom or Rigs for this project. I had decided to do cel animation using an application on my iPad called ToonSquid. As I started planning out my animating I realised that my choice of mouth design for my character was going to cause me complications with the exaggerated expressions that I wanted to draw, so I had changed it in order to fit the style more. I had then proceeded to draw out mouth shapes with this style that reflected different letters and sounds that I needed in order to prepare for the lip syncing process. 

These mouth chart can be seen below:

ANIMATING

The way I began my final animation process was by first sketching out the key frames/poses. This was without any details, my first layer was just the bodies outline. From there I broke it down into in between frames by using the onion skin tool. After that I started adding some of the details such as the hands, cigarette, smoke and wine bottle onto other layers and lastly I added the lip sync and facial expressions which I had also created new layers for. After all the elements were added I went through to play around with the timing of the frames fixing any drawings that seemed a bit off. My final detail was adding colour and merging all the layers together to create the final outcome. 

I do wish that I could have added more colour, however I ran out of time and had to decide between two stylistic choices, coloured background and black and white character or leaving the whole scene as black and white. 

Below are some snippets of the animation in the ToonSquid software: