Human Sync - Third Place

We had to animate a human lip sync so I chose one of my favourite voice acted piece which is of Gaige from Borderlands 2 and her promotional echo logs. The snippet that I used is taken from the third one from a series of four.

I had a lot of fun doing this animation as it was my first character lip sync. It went through a few changes such as her originally rocking back and forth for one part ("...third place!"). After spending a lot of time in the mirror figuring out how to animate it and having difficulty with weight shifts and perspective, I opted out of that pose and came up with a simpler and better gesture that conveyed her showing off her third place ribbon.

The poses are a bit stiff at the beginning and there are things that I wish I could have still done but due to time constraints I was unable to. Overall I think it's still a pretty good animation for my first time animating to dialogue.

Designing her was a bit hard as well, I imagined a small girl filled with such rage would be quite humorous. I also wanted to stray away from typical children designs so I made her head rectangular and gave her a huge cranium because of her intellect. I like her design and I'll probably draw her and refine it for myself.

I also started a workflow I found that made it easier for myself when animating. I first started out by thumbnailing/drawing the poses on Photoshop, importing them into ToonBoom, timing them there and then redraw with necessary changes.

So here are my key poses blocked out in photoshop: