Here is my outcome for the second lipsync exercise. I’m not sure why, but I was doubting myself throughout the whole process for this one. I think because the audio already existed paired with visuals, so my main concern was to avoid copying the video I was using. Even when shooting my own reference, I couldn’t come out with a scenario that didn’t involve a character driving, so I tried to approach the scene from a different perspective.
It took me a while to get the initial acting working, as I was afraid I was putting a lot of unnecessary movement, and after a couple of feedback, that was my initial issue. I then tried to focus mainly on head movement and expression, given that this time i had a human character I thought I could definitely push facial expressions more.
When it came to drawing the mouth shapes i tried to exaggerate those to a point where in some frames I wanted the mouth to kind of move around in an unnatural way. Because i only did it on a couple of frames and it matching a certain sound, the result isn’t too bad, but sometimes I think it looks a little bit odd.
Overall, I’ve learnt that is not always good to have a lot of movement from a character when given a very short audio, and as long as the initial acting works, I just need to trust that the rest of the in-betweens will work too.
I’ve also realised I need to once again work on anatomy. I’ve got more familiar with human face features after the facial expression exercise, and I think I was able to keep it fairly consistent throughout the frames (having a grid to follow really helped). The bit i’m not too happy about is the torso and the shoulders in particular. i think to improve there’s no way around practicing observational drawings. Life drawing is great but the model is never clothed, and I really need to start being familiar with how clothes fold over our bodies. I’m not proud of he hands either, but if I was to clean this up, I would probably draw them once or twice so that they keep their shape, as in this case, they are staying still.
