Adding lip-sync to my last two characters. I’m going for more expressive beaks, so this is looking like a scene between Groucho and Margaret Dumont.
Groucho Grebe
Tag: Character Animator
Duck Storyboard
Assembling cast, sets and opening titles for my cartoon.
Pike and Perch
We’ve got most of the Newmillerdam ecosystem appearing in Ode to a Duck. It took me a while to work out how to stop my characters floating around – you simply pin their feet to the background – but that hasn’t been a problem with these two.
Joining the swan for the prologue, this Canada goose. I haven’t given him moving eyes and eyebrows, but he seems suitably goose-like without them.
Swan Screen Test
In my animation, the swan is anything but mute as it introduces my Ode to a Duck.
Having now produced several ‘puppets’ using the Adobe Character Animator template, I’m much more familiar with the basics and more confident that it will actually work. There are plenty of optional tweaks that I could introduce but for this animated cartoon I’ve stuck to face-on characters which don’t walk or fly about, basically they’re talking heads.
Coot and Moorhen
My Ode to a Duck animation is going to be a biodiversity hotspot: here are the latest recruits, the moorhen and coot. It’s surprising how these characters take on a life of their own: I’d never thought of a moorhen as being a bit of a spiv or of a coot being an ingenue.
Grebe Screen Test
My latest Ode to a Duck screen test and the great-crested grebe is struggling with his motivation in scene 2.
Using Adobe Character Animator and Photoshop, I’ve used a sketchbook drawing as the basis for my ‘puppet’. So, just the beak-sync to add . . . all 14 mouth movements.
Ducking
We’ve started shooting, and the duck’s looking a bit worried about that.
I’ve dived in to the mysteries of Adobe Character Animator and I like the way the simple ‘puppets’ that you create in the program can be so expressive. Other aspects such as how to stop the character floating about are a mystery – although the duck might be quite relieved to hear that.
Lip-sync and bill-sync are working well though.
Character Animator
Lesson one, in Adobe Character Animator is to edit and lip-sync a simple face. The built-in microphone on my iMac seemed a bit distant. Once I’d exported the animation to Adobe Premiere Pro, I deleted the original track and re-recorded the voice using a microphone. I used a filter on the vocal track to make it sound more close-up and tried a special effect that aims to ‘thicken’ my voice.
My attempts to add a music track were, predictably, dreadful but just to try out the process of adding a backing track, I tapped on an empty treacle tin.
Hopefully having learnt some of the principles, I can now get on and produce something more intriguing.