The teacher Steve used body language to express the way the animated character should speak, for example, the body should not always be moving when saying a sentence, but should follow the rhythm of the words and then move the body after the sentence.
At first, I didn’t really understand what the teacher said about lips animation, and I had no experience in this area, I just knew to change the two poses according to the sound, so I spent a day drawing the following mouth animation.
Yes, it was awful, the whole animation looked very strange and stiff, I started to think about what went wrong, firstly I think I drew a very complicated head, which made it very difficult to animate the whole thing, there was so much movement in the hair part that I just wanted to give up as soon as I started the middle frames.
The facial muscles didn’t follow the shape of the mouth at all, which meant that the facial contours didn’t follow the expressions, making the image very stiff.
Steve’s advice to me after seeing my animation was not to start with a clean sheet, but to sketch with the pencil tool and draw more lines on each line, which was very helpful. I used to waste a lot of time trying to get a perfect line, which made it difficult to add intermediate frames, but I applied Steve’s method to my subsequent animation drawings and found that I drew faster and could draw more at the same time than before.
So I picked up the brush again and started a new version, this time I simplified the character and added the body, also the speech rhythm, I put more thought into the expressions, I wanted to exaggerate the expressions of the character and added a lot of intermediate frames, each frame was not repeated, I cleared all the frames and redraw them.
I found that the result was much more vivid and interesting, there were so many more frames than in the first draft of the animation and the movements were more consistent.
