On The Mouth

All of the dialogue has been recorded and edited for the new Ronin Dojo Community College four part mini saga. So, it is with a shitty animatic under our belts, that we charge forth into animation. Which for me means making some heads. Since the shorts Matt and I make are so dialogue intensive, and we are too lazy to deal with exposure sheets, we make heads for main characters, that can be re-used for any shots with basic angles.

A head set for a character usually contains a front, 3/4 and maybe profile head drawing, and some inbetween heads to smooth out the turns between each angle. For each of the main heads we do a set of eyebrows, eyes and mouths. When we put the whole thing into After Effects, each eyebrow, eye and mouth can be turned off an on or moved around in sync with the dialogue.

This is roughly what our mouth sets are going to be I think. 10 main upturned mouths, 3 quiet mouths and 8 down-turned mouths. For those not versed in animation, you don't make mouths for each letter but for sounds really. So number 1 on my chart is an M,P,B mouth, number 2 is works for T,D,N and a range of consonants. 3 is AH, 4 is EE, 5 is OOH etc.

Mouths 9 and 10 are redundant, they're just louder versions of mouths 5 and 3. We've found that when you're lip syncing lots of quick talking that has a lot of "AHs" going on, it's good to have a variety to switch it up so your character doesn't just look like a quacking duck.

After Effects lip syncing is something you gotta develop a feel for; some tips for any beginners are that sometimes you want to turn on mouths a frame or so before the sound hits, and try not to have a bunch of mouths on for only one frame in a row, it looks way too fast.

When we were doing IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR we made mouth and expression sets on a shot to shot basis. Afterwards, we realized that most of our angles were just head on or 3/4 and we could have been reusing those mouths and eyes if we were smart. So this is us trying to be smart- supposedly. Though depending on the distance of the camera, we have to add stroke layers to the heads in Photoshop to match the thickness of the pencil lines for the rest of the shots, but that's another story I guess. Man I hate how blogger thinks dialogue should be spelled dialog. I like the ue damn it.


Kissing Pipes & Robot Rights

Vacation Sketches

Here are some sketches I did while I was on my vacation. You can find more in my flickr set.

"elderly couple at JFK outside Balducci's-she didn't look that angry"

Some random faces at JFK

"German woman + Greek Man watching Turkey vs. Germany in the Euro Cup while aboard the ferry boat to Naxos. The Greek man suprisingly was from Rockville, MD"

I had kind of turned my chair around to draw the people all glued to the TV. It was hard to capture the poses of the German family since they kept moving around with the suspense of the game, but that old Greek dude was like a statue- rooting for anything but Turkey.

"if Athen and Zeus were ska"

Poster idea I sketched out

Turkish Delights & Robot Rights

Federal Agents Mad Cuz I'm Flagrant

A new Ronin Dojo Community College DX mini saga is now in production. We're almost finished recording. Scanning storyboards for animatics and what not. In the mean time, here are some designs for some FBI agents.


I'll post more goofiness as it comes in.



Super NinTENdo, Sega Genesis. When I was dead broke man I couldn't picture robot rights

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Usually it takes me forever to make fliers (flyers?) but this one I rattled off pretty quickly. These bands aren't ska but I can't resist drawing a dude in a black suit, shades and a pork pie hat. . . cadillac. . .yeah, the boy's a time bomb!

That's sorta how the song goes.




Tim Armstrong & Robot Rights Wrongs

Artist's Alley

Here's some Ronin Dojo Community College DX Artwork I've been futzing with.



More to come.


EDIT: Also, Matt has a new blog, or rather A blog: http://frankensteinsninja.wordpress.com/


BUMBLE BEE IS ROBOT RIGHTS!

RDHSDX Fan Sites

So this is already on the For Tax Reasons website, but I'll repeat it here anyways. Me and Matt were searching around the internet randomly for "Ronin Dojo High School DX"- the manga/anime from the 90's which our short IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR is based upon- and we found these old geocities fan sites from like 1997. Check it out, theres:

Michael Hubert's Ronin Dojo High School DX Fan Site

and then

r0nind0j0pr1me's Ultimate Ronin Dojo High School DX Fan Site

It's weird. It's like they both are fighting with each other. I dunno, you'll have to read it yourselves.


www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/301/fan_sites & Robot Rights

Whatever it takes!

So, I've been too busy to plan out an April Fools joke. So here's a regular outdated post. The other day one of my shorts, IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR, was featured on the front page of YouTube.


A big thanks to Channel Frederator for selecting it. And to the lovely Jess Park for taking that screenshot. IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR got like 300,000 more views, so that means like 300,000 more people got to hear Jess Park's heavenly Korean voice because she has the first line in the short. I mean they at least heard that before they clicked to another page or decided to write some hate comments about how we were going to hell. Oh well.

In other news, a mysterious YouTube user made a SWEET AMV out of our animations and a song from on of my favorite bands- the Max Levine Ensemble!



And oh yeah. Degrassi is sweet. Marco and Paige were at my work today.


CRAIG'S SECRET FIGHT & ROBOT RIGHTS