Denis
When beginning my animation before I started creating any sort of work to contribute towards the animation I created a weekly planner in which I could work out when I could do each bit of work and where I should be doing them (for example if I can do them at home or if I have to go to university to do them). This could then set a goal for myself each week in what work should be done and when I should book out equipment such as stages and cameras. Doing this helped to keep me on track and get my work done not only on time but to a high standard as I gave myself plenty of time so I didn't have to rush anything.
When this was done I then got to work on the pre-production phase of my animation which began with the character design of my character. I began with creating an armature guide so I could work out not only how big my puppet was going to be but also how big the armature would need to be for my character as well which was very helpful in the creation phase of my puppet. I then began running a few tests for my character trying to work out what shapes I wanted to use for my character not only for the body but the head as well as the face will be the main focus as the main focus within the animation is the lip syncing I produced in the end. I then looked in the positioning of the posture within my character as it may not seem important but posture is a key element when showing characteristic within the character you have designed so I made sure to pay attention to this as well in my designing process. I then briefly went over the types of clothes he would wear in the final piece and the colours I am going to use for my character. When this was all done I finally reached the main design process which was the mouth design which I decided to do paper cut out for each formation of every spoken letter. This meant I had to do a design to portray each pronunciation shape from the mouth which was very complicated but I achieved this after time well spent on the process.
When the design process was done and I had finalised the audio for my animation I then began to create the dope sheets. I did this by listening the the audio frame by frame and listening for the exact letter (or pronunciation of conjoined letters) and wrote them down on my dope sheet. When it came to animating this was the key element of getting my lip syncing correct as this told me which mouth shape I needed for the exact frame I was shooting which put together creates the mouth movements that completely sync up to the dialogue.
The last process I needed to go through before animating the final piece I just had to create the storyboards for my short animation. These are shown below.
When all of my pre-production was complete, my model was created the the mouth shapes were all cut out I was ready to begin animating. For the animation process I used a Canon EOS 1100D, Canon Remote RS-60E3, green screen and Dragonframe. Once everything was set up I spent a few days animating my work until I felt everything was not only shot but it was at a high enough level for me to then get all of the images from Dragonframe, onto my USB so I could begin the post-production. I then put all of the files into After Effects to begin compositing all of the images and adding in the audio as well as editing the green-screen to black so within the animation the only area of focus is the puppet itself. Once this was all done I rendered the video and had finally finished my first ever lip syncing animation! I think the final outcome of this project turned out tremendously and to say stop-motion is not my strong area of animation and it was my first time lip syncing I think the final outcome turned out very well.