(Just to clarify, this was a project we each worked on individually)
One of our first assignments in second year was to design a character, and draw that same character in 3 different positions, Front, Profile and a 3/4 view. We used this same character to do future briefs so I thought it would make sense to post all the different assignments involving this one character in one post. So Like I said, the first thing we did was to design the character, with the only rule being keep it as human looking as possible, nothing too crazy like an alien with 5 eyes or anything like that. But I still wanted to have fun with the design So I decided to make my character into a orc warrior. Then we had to do the 3 different positions, to do this we drew the front viewing position first, then the profile position. To do the 3/4 we treated it as if we doing a in-between frame and the 2 positions we already had were the key frames, where we stacked the front and profile view on top of one another, placed it on a lightbox, and determined what the 3/4 view would be from the 2 different positions we already had.
As part of our third assignment, with the second being that we animated a draw bridge going down then being brought back up again. We were asked to take the character and have them do a head turn. we did this by first of all taking 2 of the drawing out of the 3 we had for the animation, that being the front facing and the 3/4. We made some minor alterations to the front viewing frame seeing as we didn't want the head move rigidly from left to right, but rather have the character's head swoop down slightly from left to right. we were also asked to make the character blink whilst turning their head. The last step required was to make the right facing frame, so we simply took the left facing frame, flipped it over, drew over it on a new piece of paper, and traced over the head, although I didn't trace the body seeing as it was only the head that has to go from left to right, so the body would only slightly turn to the right but not as much as the head. After refining all the key frames, all we had to then was start inbetweening, resulting in the video below.
For the next assignment, we would actually animate the character speaking to a piece of audio our tutor gave us, have their head turn and have them blink at the end of the turn, and then turn back. First of all we were given the dialogue, that being "please believe me" and the X sheet that already had the lip sync mapped out for us. It was up to us to draw the 6 different mouth frames, where we took the first key frame and traced over everything excluding the mouth, and specifically seeing as my character was so bulky, the jaw. After that we had to draw the different eye frames for the blink at the end of the head turn. Similarly we took the last keyframe of our previous head turn assignment, retraced over everything excluding the eyes, and then drew the different eye blinking frames over that.
For our final assignment involving our character's we designed at the beginning of the year, we were asked to take a piece of dialogue from any piece of media of our choosing, whether that be a movie, show or video game, and sync up that audio to a X sheet and see if it synced up properly by using our character. Now I should make note that we were allowed to design a completely new character for this brief if we wished, but the audio that I wanted to use I felt fit this character so well so I stuck with him. I took my piece of dialogue from the Transformers: Fall of Cybertron video game. At first there was too much background noise, so I had to go back, play through that level again with all background noise and music turned off in the game's settings in order to capture it properly. The next part was to take that audio, bring it into Adobe Audition and go off the audio file to determine the lip sync. After about 3 attempts, I recorded the frames in the order according to my X sheet and this was the final result.
And that was all the assignments that involved this character. Overall It was absolutely exciting to finally learn all these animation techniques and put them in action and I couldn't be happier with how these turned out.
