Animatic for Character Animation, plus sketches

I have been studying each pose that Jim Carrey makes in my chosen extract and I have sketched out the key ones so I can pose the character rig accordingly in the final character animation. I have also tried exaggerating the pose in some of my sketches to give my character more appeal.

Click on an image to enlarge

I used the thumbnail images above to make an animatic, so I could plan out how the character will move around the scene. In this animatic, I also thought about camera shots and camera movements and I have put in occasional indications of what the camera will be doing. The sketches are very crude in this video, but I feel I have captured the poses well and given them some exaggeration as well.

"Oh, there is just one more thing, lieutenant!"

I have just finished my first lip syncing test with some of the dialogue from my chosen clip. I filmed myself saying the line, "Oh there is just one more thing lieutenant!" from the film Ace Ventura, and I used that as reference to animate the Moom rig.

Here is the video of me saying the line...

And here is the video of the character I animated saying the line...

I think I did well with the lip syncing, although it is a little exaggerated and over the top compared to my live action clip. I also had a lot of jerking head movement towards the beginning which needs to be made slower and smoother. However, I am pleased with the movement of the eyes and eyebrows as they move well with the dialogue, particularly towards the end as he says, "lieu-ten-ant"

I still need to do sketching to plot out each pose at each point within the dialogue sequence. And also animate the rest of the dialogue in Maya.

First lip sync test

Using the help of a lecture I had on lip syncing today, I have just animated my first lip sync test, using a piece of sound that was given to me. I am rather pleased with how it has turned out, considering this is the first time that I have properly lip synced a character in Maya. This seems like it could be an easy exercise if I do it some more, but it may become challenging when I come to animating the Ace Ventura dialogue.