Getting to grips with acting, and dialogue

[Cryptonic26]

Am I the only one who cant use a dope sheet?

 

It just seems very clunky and anti-intuitive compared to keyframing the dialogue by hand... anyone think I should give learning the dope sheet another shot, or am I fine where I'm at here?

 

dialoguetest.zip

 

feedback muchly appriciated! (on anything but the ears.. I'm getting to that ... )

 

[A cookie to the first person who guesses what movie the sound clip is from!]

[robcat2075]

There's so little of the mouth the mouth visible, I'm not sure it matters, but generally do whatever works for you. I think common practice is moving away from automated solutions back to manual keyframing for mouth animation.

 

As far as the gestures, the part with the left hand while the off screen voice is reading out the combo is too in synch. How does Rabbit know when the other guy is going to start or stop? An acting teacher would probably start shouting "dont' anticipate".

 

And the right hand flick after "amazing" might have done better to actually hit on "amazing".

 

But that's a fun clip, I enjoyed it.

[Cryptonic26]

you know, I was thinking that to myself when I animated it. (the hand guestures) My first pass I did have it off sync by two to six frames, but it just didnt feel right for some reason. I understand that it's 'propper' and 'accurate' but it just didnt work on screen, I'm not sure I understand why it was so bothersome to me, (chances are it wasnt animated properly to start with though) I'll try and re-time that tomorrow, we'll see what I come up with.

 

 

Thanks for the feedback!

[Dhar]

Sounds like Mel Brooks...

 

Am I getting warm?

[robcat2075]

My first pass I did have it off sync by two to six frames, but it just didnt feel right for some reason. I understand that it's 'propper' and 'accurate' but it just didnt work on screen,

I'd do some other gesture that isn't timed at all to the numbers being counted out.

[CreativeAustinYankee]

You might find Jason Osipa's book Stop Staring useful.

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...1876&hl=visimes

 

There are quite a few on this forum who use a modified version of Jason's set up. Try a search on the forum for visimes.

 

The dialogue clip is from the classic scifi spoof Spaceballs.. specifically the combination to the shield surrounding Druidia.

 

The clip isn't focused enough on the character's mouth to really provide a detailed critique, recommend moving the camera closer.

 

Steve P.

[higginsdj]

Personally I find dopesheets a waste of time for good lip synch. All the emphasis is on mouth shape for a given sound/phenome. Speech just doesn't work that way. More often than not the mouth shape needed is a combination of 2 or more mouth shape poses - the dopesheet cannot handle this!

 

Here's a very good test (I did this with Frank Silas as the facial model and his Devil Character as the aniamted model). Video yourself acting out a line of dialogue but close in just on your face. Now load this into AM along with your favourite character. Now position your character head and the roto of you acting in an action window side by side and try to animate the head and facial expressions to match your video.

 

You can do it with the dopesheet first up just to see how wowful the result can be. Now do it again with a standard phonome setup and see just how bad it is again. What is wrong? You need to set up poses for mouth shapes and not default word sounds.

 

Heres an example with some animated examples

 

Cheers

 

Cheers