modmad:

here’s an old patreon reward to fill in the drawing-hiatus void a bit; something I get asked about a lot is the ‘acting’ in my comics and how to be subtle with conveying emotions. The answer is mostly experience and constantly observing people in real life to learn about expressions, but knowing when to ‘dial up’ or ‘dial down’ emotion is very important! context is king- this is basically the same advice that Carl Barks gave on one of his reference sheets here (in a much more succinct manner!):

underversesans:

bronzebasilisk:

axelkatten:

red-pencil-sharpener:

kaiko-art:

thankyoucorndog:

studying animation more like

ok, looks easy enough

okay, i get this… this is fine…

aaaaaahh

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

Richard Williams, ladies and gentlemen.

Ah-yup!

Yeah it is literally this.

Congrats!  If you’ve gotten this far and this isn’t for a movie, you may have just made around a whole 2 seconds of animation!

Now colour them

I hope with this, people can understand why it takes me too long making just 8 minutes of animation each month.

gingercatsneeze:

1. Ah Fai was a chief animator for McDull’s animated features. He’s super cool. Ultimate senpai. 

2. Previous post on breakdowns right here 

Some thoughts on acceleration and force

I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns. 

Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful. 

Not so much of a tutorial than a personal experience. I hope you find this interesting hahaha 

crazyhamlet:

worldhero:

worldhero:

crazyhamlet:

artist-refs:

Phoneme Chart by TheEndIsNearUs

This is a nice chart!
Lipsync is one of my not-so-secret passions. I also hate front mouths. They’re harder to inbetween, I find, and they’re not used nearly as frequently. Here’s some ¾ mouths I made.

These are the basic shapes I was taught, and I use. Standard lipsync shapes;; 

You have your closed mouth to open, to clenched teeth, to oohs, and your (often optional) F, L, and TH mouths.

Tips!

• Your top teeth don’t move;  I mean, stylistically it happens sometimes (Gravity falls does it fairly well, as much as I haaaaate that), but your lipsync will prolly look better if they don’t.
  
  
• My clenched teeth (SH) mouth is always a bit wider than my biggest AH mouth. It adds variation and helps your shapes blend more nicely. Conversely, my biggest AH mouth is narrower than my SH mouth and my closed (M) mouth.

• My L mouth is a tiny bit more closed than my biggest AH, and not as closed as my second biggest AH. It fits between them nicely so that if you have to go from an L to an AH mouth, like you would for the word “Like” or “Love”, it doesn’t pop or look weird.
  
  
• My R and oo mouths move forward on the face a bit, it adds dimension, and if you leave it all in the same place and have the mouth just shrink into a circle it miiiight look weird.
  

Aaaaand I think that’s it?  Never go from a SH mouth to a TH mouth, it’ll pop and look weird…uhhh;  

Also! It’s alright to skip some shapes;;

So below is a lipsync I made using the above shapes;

It’s clear what they’re saying, the mouth is moving nicely, but there’s only one problem. Veeeery rarely do they give you enough time to use all the mouths you want to make it move nice. Voice actors talk fast to fit everything in and holycrap do we hate  love them for it.

So here’s a fast one.

Those two gifs should start at the same time, and notice that the second one stops while the first one is still saying “doing”.

I not only cut out the mouth between the biggest AH and the clenched teeth, but I combined the word “Are you” into, like, 3 shapes. I also trimmed some inbetweens overall. The lipsync still reads, though! You can still tell what they’re saying even without audio (which would help it a bit, haha~)

Cutting out that stuff ended the lipsync a whole 14 frames sooner (more than half a second!). It doesn’t sound like much, but with 24 frames per second and dialogue moving at the speed of light, you don’t have time to dilly dally. This isn’t a preschool show;;


Aaaaaand I think that’s it. Liiiipsyyyyyync~~~

Now to go back to actual work and stop talking about things most ppl don’t care about;

I AM CRYING TEARS OF RELIEF BECAUSE I NEED THESE REFERENCES FOR MY SENIOR FILM’S DIALOGUE~

Reblogging this again because I’ve been using this reference for the last 2 months to help with my lip-synch in my film, and I’ve just tested one scene where I used the reference…And my mouth-drawings have improved tenfold ever since.

To the OP who made this chart…I wish I could hug you right now because you helped make my film look much better. c8

This post makes its rounds every so often;; I’m glad people are getting use out of me not wanting to do the actual work I had!