New Schedule

As we are all new to so many things in our production there have been set backs. With the initial schedule we had to estimate how long certain things would take, such as making mouths, as we have never done it before. Due to the lack of knowledge and understanding of puppet making we are behind our original schedule.

BUT.

Thankfully. As we are using dope sheets which our genius Sam Mealey has been putting together (no idea how he is doing it!) the actual animating is rather fast as we now just have follow our dope sheets.

So. This is our new schedule for shooting. 

Hopefully no set backs this time.

My Final Replacement Tests

This is a few replacement tests testing the new swaying music which is more like a bop and sway now.

This is a quick one not taking any timing into account, just to make sure the shapes and replacements worked together. As you can see no detail was added to the models so I could just focus on the body shape.

Added hair to see if it also works along side the body shape. As said before, I toke no account of timing, just testing the replacement. 

Began to look at timing. Slowly up and quick down. Quick up and slow down.

Added music to work with the timing of the bops. 

In this clip I decided to concentrate on doing a quick bop up and slow down to the middle again. 

Lip Syncs

Here are my lip syncs that i made in Premier for the Bass and Backing Singers.

Mouth Shapes

These are the mouth shapes I came up with last week to lip sync with the audio.

Backing Singers

Bass 

Bass Test Animations

Over the last week I have been testing the movement of the base character.

These are my first few test. I found that some of the movements didn't work well for timing but was a good start to understanding what i need to do when animating.

After all the tests I did I cut the full track into 4 pieces and animated the exact movements I plan on using for our final animation.

Mice Mouths

Now, try saying that quickly!

So, we have began to make mouth shapes. First making the teeth and lip shape and moulding it out of silicon (blue stuff in the photo). This keeps every teeth and lip size the same and consistent for the replacement animation. 

We then rolled out black backgrounds for the mouths out of sylcon and bake them for a solid back. Then add the white teeth and then put on the lips on top (made also out of sylcon) and cut off the access background and bake again so the whole mouth is solid. 

And here is Sam with his mouse army!

Photo of first replacement idea

This is my first models testing my first movement idea for my replacement models. It was the idea of the mice swaying side to side with there whole body. I tried hard to make it work but it just didn't work.