Audio Animation
For my animation with audio i decided that i wanted to experiment with different character designs to what i normally would and so the main characters are a flower, bee and birds which only appear for a short time but are important to the piece of audio i have chosen due to the fact that at the beginning of the clip there are birds singing and so this is why they have been designed.
i decided to design these particular characters because i wanted the characters voices to work with the characters really well and so as soon as i heard the birds i decided that it would be a good idea to have a theme with the animation which is set in the garden.
Test Flying Bee
When i decided to design a bee for a character i wanted to look into exactly how a bee moves and so i looked at various videos and the one below is a slowed down version of how a bee flys and i still moves really fast even slowed down so i think in order to animate my bee i will need to only use very quick movements to create this flying effect.I also looked into antz and bugs life as well as bee movie just to see how the bugs fly.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2PatPORGnA
This was my first attempt at making my bee character fly i think for a first attempt it works quite well but i feel that there are too many movements and so this is making the bee appear to move slow which is not what i wanted and so i think that when i do my final animation i shall only move the wings from the middle position to the higher position and then back to the high position so there are only two key movements and it will just be flicking between these to frames and so this should make the bee appear to move quicker.
Birds
The birds are not really in the scene very long and so i think that i would just like to do a simple scene in which the birds are either flying or jumping and so i looked at a video (below) which is a pixar short about birds and some of the stuff in which i want to include within my animation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-akT0y8c6w
The birds don't really appear for very long within the scene and the animation was my first attempt at trying to get the birds to appear within the scene and to see if it worked effectively. After trying this scene and testing it to the dope sheet i realised that what i wanted to include within my final piece was too long for the amount of time that i intended it to last for and so i will have to cut it down so that it works better. i think it needs to be changed to something simpler so that it works more effectively because i feel that at the minute i am overcomplicated the scene because it really doesn't last that long.
This was the second test for the birds i simplified it down and i feel that it works better than the first one because it runs smoother and it also works within the time slot that i have allocated for this short scene
Action Test
This is just a very short scene that i was just testing to see if the body language works well which is why the characters mouth is missing because i haven't done the lip sync yet.
I feel that the movement in the arm works really well and so with the lip sync it should all come together to create a very angry emotion which is what wanted for the character because i want the voices to work with the characters performances
Lip Sync
Because my character is a talking flower i looked in to films which used this same character choice and the only one i could find was the 'Alice In Wonderland' scene in which there are talking/singing flowers which is shown in the clip below.
I wanted to experiment with lip sync with my characters and so i started with the first bit of speech which is when the character says 'don't' and so this test is me playing around with this
I think that the 'don't' bit works quite well because when i first started to lip sync this i thought that i had to spell out every single letter within the word but i realised that i only really had to sync the phonetics within the word so this was the 'ont' bit
Lip Sync With Sound Test
I decided that the only way that i would see if my animation was working i would have to test the first part with sound just to make sure that all the talking was coming in at the right time in correspondent to the sound
From doing this test i can see that my lip sync is working well with the sound and so i will carry on with the rest of the scene and hopefully it should work
Final
This is my final animation and i feel that it works really well with the camera angles and the characters. i think that there is one scene which doesn't really work very well because i was trying to make the flower look as though she was gritting her teeth but because i moved her mouth too much it looks as though she is talking when the audio isn't playing so if i were to do this again i would definitely go back and work on this scene. Another thing that i feel didn't really go as well as i would have liked was the speed of the animation because i no that it is quite a fast paced piece of audio but in some of my animation you cant really tell what happens because the frame will be there for a second then its gone and so i would have liked to have worked on this a bit more.
On thing which i think worked really well is the overall facial expressions and actions which the characters are making because this was a key element in which i wanted to include within my animation. I also feel that the bees wings work really well because i wanted them to be fast but still be recognisable and i think i did this.
