Grim Grinning Ghosts

[Lucky_Bob]

Here's a short film I did to see if I could animate to music and singing. I had a lot of fun doing it.

http://www.freewebs.com/jtn1989/grimgrinningghosts.htm

It's streamed on You Tube now so everyone can see it without downloading a bazillion MB file to their
desktop :D

Enjoy!
James

[athena]

Here's a short film I did to see if I could animate to music and singing. I had a lot of fun doing it

Nice job! :)

Lip syncing is one of those more evil things to try to do in animation... when you get into mouth shapes if you're off by a frame the whole thing looks wrong... if you really want to get into it though, I strongly recommend this book, "Stop Staring" by Jason Osipa (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0782141293/keyfratheanim-20)... granted there is quite a bit of 3D stuff in there, but he actually uses many 2D examples to work you up to the final lipsync.

[Lucky_Bob]

Nice job! :)

Lip syncing is one of those more evil things to try to do in animation... when you get into mouth shapes if you're off by a frame the whole thing looks wrong... if you really want to get into it though, I strongly recommend this book, "Stop Staring" by Jason Osipa (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0782141293/keyfratheanim-20)... granted there is quite a bit of 3D stuff in there, but he actually uses many 2D examples to work you up to the final lipsync.

Thanks for the tips Athena :D

Yeah, I've looked through that book over at the book store last time I was there. It was really cool looking.

I'm ususally okay with lip syncing in animation but animating this was a pain because first I animated right to the lip sync by importing audio clips into my animation program then I had to extract the audio and try and match it up to one track in my video editor. I guess I was off by a frame or two so some of the syncing was off.
Dang I hate lip syncing... it's a pain it the... well... for the sake or the kids I'll say 'the head' but...

James

[athena]

Are you doing this in Flash?


If so, you should be able to import the audio file directly into the flash timeline... and then there's this method of building a group of mouth shapes that you can key to flip between... sorry, my experience in this consists of one lesson in one Flash course a couple years ago... but I do remember the instructor, (a director from Bardel who was working on Mucha Lucha (http://www2.warnerbros.com/lucha/home.html) at the time), showing us how the whole process was done right within Flash with basically no in-betweens for the mouth-shapes... just this popping back and forth between mouth-shape images.

If not... err, ignore what I just said. ;)

[Lucky_Bob]

Are you doing this in Flash?


If so, you should be able to import the audio file directly into the flash timeline... and then there's this method of building a group of mouth shapes that you can key to flip between... sorry, my experience in this consists of one lesson in one Flash course a couple years ago... but I do remember the instructor, (a director from Bardel who was working on Mucha Lucha (http://www2.warnerbros.com/lucha/home.html) at the time), showing us how the whole process was done right within Flash with basically no in-betweens for the mouth-shapes... just this popping back and forth between mouth-shape images.

If not... err, ignore what I just said. ;)

I use a program called Moho to do my animation.

http://www.lostmarble.com/moho

It's basically computer animation only 2D instead of 3D. You rig the characters with bones and can do particle effects ect.

I had the ability to import the whole audio track into one animation file but that woulda taken HOURS to render. It took me at least 15-20 mins to render small 10-17 second clips.
So I pretty much cut the song into little 10 to 17 second peices and animated to those then I took out the audio and imported them into my video editor and lined up the lip syncing as best I could.

James

[lonely_princess]

well done james i really enjoyed it

[Lucky_Bob]

Thanks a lot.

I need to update that link since I switched to a .com domain:

http://www.nranimation.com/grimgrinningghosts.htm