Animation Approaches

I’ve made some big steps on my photo animation project in the past week or so. Today I finished lip-syncing all of Jennie’s dialogue, which constitutes the majority of the first episode, and I was able to copy the keyframes from the forward facing model to the 3/4 profile model without any trouble, which is very exciting to me because I don’t have to re-do all that work. The great thing I’m seeing in all this is that the default mode of these characters is a blank face, which is exactly the kind of thing I love to see in an actor. It makes the line readings seem that much more dry and odd. Of course, odd is the default for this whole thing. It’s really quite weird looking. And it’s the kind of detail work that makes my eyes tired at the end of the day.

I also used Photoshop’s Photomerge tool for the first time in order to create the background for the episode. I’m going to set it in a supermarket, so I went to my local Key Food and fired up my digital still camera. I put the drive mode on continuous shooting and pushed it down the aisle on a shopping cart. Then I had Photoshop figure out how to stick all the photos together automatically. It looks terrific, although it’s not particularly sharp thanks to a slightly long shutter speed. Luckily it’s a background so it can be out of focus a little.