Kyle Gilman’s Camera Noise Productions

I managed to work through some of the focus problems I had with my pictures and I’ve built a fairly complete “Kyle Facing Forward” model. Now I’m going to do 3/4 profiles of me and Jennie and then make the first episode. Here’s another lip sync test. Go to Vimeo to watch it in HD.

Kyle Lip Sync Test from Kyle Gilman on Vimeo.

I made a lot of progress on my animation project recently. The biggest breakthrough came from Aharon Rabinowitz’s tutorial on Lip-Syncing for Character Animation over at Creative Cow. I highly recommend it. I’m using his time remap method for lip sync and eye movement. It’s really helped me understand how this project can be done as quickly as I had originally hoped. I should be able to create a whole scene from multiple angles and only do the lip sync once. I’ll just use the same frames for each mouth position for every angle (straight-on, profile, etc) and copy and paste keyframes to each one.

Here’s my first test. It’s a line of dialog from the first episode. I did an arbitrary camera move and put Jennie in front of a background so I can start figuring out how those things work. I finally figured out that increasing the aperture size of an After Effects camera is a quick way to ensure the low depth of field I was looking for.

Watch it in HD at Vimeo

There’s definitely an Uncanny Valley effect going on here. Since it’s so close to looking like a real person, I think it is guaranteed to look a little creepy no matter what I do. But I’m going to work with that, not against it.