Motion Studies - Change of Emotions and Lipsync

This week's task was to draw a character changing from one emotion to another, and then saying 'I love you'. It was my first time trying lip-syncing, but I think I did well. It is very simple, as long as you get the timing and shapes right.

My first attempt was in class, and I hadn't taken a reference video so this version was not very good. The timing was off, I didn't use the character's body to express the emotions that much, I wasn't sure how to draw the face in between each emotion. I think one of the problems was I was focusing too much on making my drawing look like a character, rather than expressing emotions and focusing on the lipsync.

So, after class I went and made my reference video. I kept the same gesture of 'pleading' hands, but I also added a jump up into arms in the air at the end of the sequence. I was originally going to have from sad to pleading, but I thought the change from sad to excitable would be better. I still wanted to include the pleading hands, so I used it as a transition to the arms up. The numbers in the corner correlate to the frame numbers in my reference video. In this attempt I didn't stress about making my character look 'cartoon-like', but instead focused on the expressions and exaggeration.

Here's my reference video I used for this animation. The first go wasn't expressive enough, so I used the second try as reference.

To prepare for my lipsync I used the note function in TVPaint so I could phonetically spell out the words, and draw the mouth shapes next to each word. I found it helped a lot to break down the words, and to draw it in time with the audio so I could just translate this to the animation. I recorded my audio on my phone as this is just a test. I think I said 'I love you' too quickly, because I found it hard to fit all the mouths in the frames. Next time I do a lipsync task I will record sentences at different speeds.

I then added a face and the lipsync, again not worrying too much about the style. I was going to add eyebrows to show emotion, however I felt like the facial expressions and movement were enough. 

Here is the final version with audio: