Sunday, February 8, 2009

I've Got A Black Hole In My Mind

I've been working on a music video for the awesome pop punk band, Teenage Bottlerocket, and things are starting to come together. I scanned in some of my work to do a little lip sync test. Check it out.



While making the Ben Weasel music video, I discovered that animating the lip sync for a person singing requires a more than my standard set of 10 mouths I use for speech. Talking is relatively fast, so I can get away with popping between mouth shapes with little notice of the change. However the drawn out movements of singing require a few inbetween's here and there to make everything look smooth. So I draw one AH mouth and then a slightly smaller AH mouth to cushion the mouth movements. Several varying sizes of OO mouths, and so on and so forth.

It's not perfect, but it works ok, and I need to cut all the corners I can when I'm making this thing on my own.

Anyways, here's a head pencil test I did of Ray nodding his head along to the music. There's no music in the clip so you can just imagine him nodding along to anything. Maybe a song, maybe a school presentation you're working on about the Marshall Plan or something. I don't know, go nuts.




4 comments:

dmac said...

Blood on the register the grill and on the floor
Blood on the fryer and the walk-in cooler door

Stephen Sloan said...

Solid construction, nice sense of depth on both those head nods Ben. Looking forward to seeing more.

:: smo :: said...

haha i think more people need to animate headbanging cycles.

Ben said...

Thanks a lot. Hopefully the clean cycle of head banging looks decent too.

There need to be more headbanging cycles indeed. Animating dancing and stuff has been a little tough for me, movement and timing wise, hopefully I can make some progress with this vid.