BRIEF
This project is about making a 10s to 15s animation with a voice. So the voice I chose is number7. One man is asking the other man whether can he dance, and they also say that Sarah is a great dancer. I will cut some part of the voice, cause the total voice is longer than 15 seconds.
MOODBOARD
My idea was to set this communication in a banquet. So I found some illustrations of banquets. During this time, I found a film “Crimson Peak”, I really enjoy the dance part in the film, I also like the colour style and the environment of that part. So I decided to use this style to design my characters and environment. And I extracted a lot of colours from the dance part in that film.
CHARACTER DESIGN
There were three characters in my animation. One is human, the other two are ghosts. So one ghost can’t dance but the other ghost which is a young lady is very good at dancing.
BACKGROUND
STORYBOARD
My animation of living voices is about one man and one ghost were have a communication about dancing on a banquet. And this banquet is not only for man but also for ghost. The man asked whether the ghost can dancing, the ghost said no. However one ghost called Sarah is really good at dancing, and at the final part in animation she was dancing in the front of the man and the ghost. But her dancing is showed as turning around in the animation, this was due to I thought I don’t have enough skills and time to animate someone dancing. The other reason was that part only show few seconds, I didn’t think the time was enough to show a fantastic dance.
X SHEET
During this project, we were been taught to make the X sheets. This is my first time to make X sheets, to be honest, this is really confusing and difficult to make at the beginning. I mean confirming the sound of each frames of a dialogue is a little bit difficult. I have to listen the dialogue again and again. However, as all the mouth shapes and the sound are showed in the final piece, I thought this really makes animators much easier to arrange the details of the animation. And in the subsequent production, the X sheets really increased the efficiency of drawing the mouth shapes of characters. To be honest, I personally think X sheet is the most useful thing I learnt through the living voices project. I definitely will keep practicing it in my animations.
CHARACTER A
CHARACTER B
KEY FRAMES
REFLECTION
Through this project I found myself some weaknesses or rather something to work harder on. The first thing is that I need to observe more about how people move. There are few actions of the characters look not natural. Although, with the help of my teachers I had changed some parts so the characters look better than before, some actions were wrong at the beginning and I didn’t know how to change it. In fact, I designed my characters in a cute style so that I could draw the actions much easier, this was my idea. However, it doesn’t work that well, I still need doing more sketches and focusing on the movement of people. The second problem is my background and characters don’t mix very well, it looks like my characters are stand in the front of a background instead of in that environment. I think the main problem is my background is a little bit strange. Cause they were in a banquet, however the people in the background was been simplified and they didn’t move. And in some part the background was just filled with colour. Although I thought there was not enough time to design the background, I was so bad at drawing the environment, I need to spend more time on practicing background.
And this is also my first time to use Toon Boom Harmony, in my opinion, it isn’t an easy software to learn. It took me whole week to get used to the basic operation of it. I may need to relearn how to it. After all, although there were some problems of my final animation, I had a lot of new experiences about the production process of the animation.