For my end of year one project, I had to create something that represented the democratization of media and entertainment. I decided to create my animated sequence inspired by a podcast (independent creators on YouTube/Spotify Sweet Boys Podcast). I was already a fan of the show so knew a lot of the in-jokes and personality behind it-making it easier to design characters and scenes to suit it. I used Adventure Time and Midnight Gospel for my visual reference, Midnight Gospel had a similar concept of animating to a podcast so this worked well. In order to create a piece of work in the time given, I wasn't in a position to hand draw each frame so decided to learn Character Animate, this software would allow me to import my hand drawn designs and lip-sync to pre-recorded audio downloaded from the show.
There were plenty of teething problems with puppet pinning limbs, drawing out individual mouth shapes (as I didn't want to use the generic ones seeing as they didn't fit the visual theme) and setting up my webcam to record more natural head movements/blinking.
Once I'd re-programmed each mouth shape to my custom ones, I had to import the Podcast audio for lip-syncing. Through Character Animate I was able to use my webcam to record minor head movements to fit the audio, it also registered blinking although I had to create blinking PNGs in order for the software to add them in. I recorded a couple of run-throughs and picked the clearest one (a couple were not worth using as the puppet pin between the neck area, head and body wasn't functioning correctly and the head would overlap the body if I moved past a certain point on screen).
Comments