Blogpost 1: Week 1 - Exercise 1A - Boris Facial Expression

This is the 1st exercise of 3DPF. I'm tasked to follow the audio given, and create the facial expressions by focusing on 3 main parts: Lip-sync, phoneme, and the overall mood of the entire animation. Firstly, I tested the different controls of the model's face, to have a rough idea of where do I start when animating it together with the audio. Then, I marked the key frames where the jaws will be opened widest or smallest, and the parts where the cheeks and eyes should be moving. The result will be shown in the video below:

Boris Animation (EXAMPLE GIVEN BY LECTURERS)

Boris Animation (1st Try)

I wasn't really that satisfied with my work after comparing with the given example animation. There were clear head movements in the example which made it even more realistic, giving weight to the different words. As a result, I took time to listen and asked myself questions like,"What are the words that I would show weight by using head movement when I speak this sentence?" Giving words like "POWER" adds realism into the animation when head movements were added. Moving the eyes also helped to show a very negative and fierce side of Boris, which was also one of the actions that was given in the example given. The result of my 2nd try is shown below.

Boris Animation (2nd Try)

After looking through my 2nd animation, I thought of doing something that Mr. Douglas (Lecturer) had suggested during class. Adding blinks to the eyes. I tried it out and it did helped to make the animation even better. Also, Mr. Douglas suggested that editing in the graph editor helps the animation to be less robotic, and I edited parts of the graph editor such as the movement of the head, jaws and eyes to make the animation as realistic as possible. I'm quite satisfied with my 3rd try, though I know there's still much more room for improvements to be made.

Boris Animation (3rd Try)