Preparations
I had the idea straight away to use audio from the 1985 black comedy Clue, which if you haven’t seen it, is based on the board game Clue (or Cluedo depending on where you’re from), so you can probably guess the basic plot.
In the specific audio segment I chose, a motorist had just knocked on the door asking to use the telephone, and the butler instinctively locked him in the room in order to prevent him from exploring the house and stumbling upon the crime scene that the characters are trying desperately to solve so that they themselves can avoid the mysterious murderer as well as being implicated. Miss Scarlett and Professor Plum are debating whether it would be more suspicious to leave him locked up or ask him to get out of the house. Abruptly, Mrs. Peacock stands up and begins screaming hysterically, “Oh, who cares, that guy doesn’t matter! Let him stay locked up for another half an hour! The police will be here by then and there are two dead bodies in the study!” She is then shushed by everyone else.
This moment is actually very funny in the movie, not only because Mrs. Peacock looks like this-
-but also because of the actress’s incredible campy performance, shrieking and waving her arms wildly. Despite how funny the movie is, though, I of course can’t expect that to come through with just this one audio segment, but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it firstly because it’s intriguing, and secondly it’s very expressive, allowing me to make the most of an over-the-top, dynamic scene that’ll stand out as a performance animation.
I recorded my reference footage, acting out the audio as dramatically as I could, differently every time to compare. I felt inspired to break a wine glass for effect.
Then I split my reference footage into frames in Photoshop, intending to refer to every third image to help me get a good idea of what the pose should look like. I originally planned to delete the ones that are in between keyframes, but decided ultimately to leave them as a guide if I end up needing it.
Next I went into GarageBand and tried to get the audio a little bit clearer, since it’s from an older movie. I succeeded, although the difference is not remarkable.
Then I started looking around for a good rig to use. This was actually trickier than I thought, despite the number of rigs available to us. My specifications were that the rig must be a female human character, ideally older looking to match the audio, more cartoonish rather than hyper-realistic (as I plan my animation to be very stylized) and one obviously with a good control system. There were very few rigs I found that fit all of these criteria. Ultimately I decided on Luna, which I downloaded from Gumroad.
Luna seemed perfect, but as soon as I started trying it out I noticed that her unique looking facial controls were annoyingly visible in every render. Every single one of them had all of its render stats turned on so I had to go through and uncheck all of them.
I created the wine glass, which I’m very proud of, and I was so excited with my ability to make glass that I also gave her glasses, in order to make her appear a little bit older. I then gave her a hair texture with a little bit of gray.
I slid her glasses onto her face, taking care to adjust them as needed so that the mesh would appear realistic with her hair. I added a parent constraint to the top head control and the glasses and got them to move around just fine.
Then I found myself an environment. I knew that I obviously didn’t have to remake Clue, but this specific audio requires the speaker to be a) inside a large older house that would have a “study”, and b) speaking to a group of people who are c) trying to cover up a murder. And so I did loosely base my setting on it. I chose the Victorian Manor and added bottles and cans littering the floor to give the impression that a party may mysteriously have gotten out of hand. Then I added the debris and blood in the background to correlate to the audio and catch the viewer’s interest. Although I’m proud of this blood splatter effect, I’m a little nervous that it’s slightly too grotesque and will give the shot an unpleasant energy that may put off some viewers. But the time for deciding yes or no on the blood is after I’ve finished the actual animation.
I decided that I would do the lip sync before any of the rest of the work, because looking at the face straight on and unmoving when I work on it usually ends in a better result for me. It allows me to get a better idea of how well it’s working.
However, as I started working with Luna, I had a hard time even getting past the second key frame. I couldn’t figure out why, but the mesh would move unpredictably without being keyed and certain keyframes would change when I touched that control again later on, even if I didn’t set another keyframe. For example, I’d key the mouth to be slightly open, and then a few frames later it would completely unhinge itself when I touched another control, and then stay that way when I deleted the new key or hit undo. I tried keying the entire rig each time I made even the slightest adjustment but the same thing was happening regardless. I opened up the completely untouched Luna I’d downloaded and her facial controls were also janky. And so I decided not to waste more time trying to force Luna to work. It would be better not to even start with her and get my work done on a more reliable rig.
And so I went to Janine.
For purely aesthetic reasons I didn’t like the Janine rig, and that’s why I didn’t choose it in the first place. I feel that this character is not only ugly but almost fringing on amateurish. Pointy helmet hair, super shiny solid color blinn all over, barely distinguishable lips, absolutely no nostrils of any kind, really just a seriously terrible nose. She looks like an N64 Majora’s Mask NPC. On her web page she clearly has been given a new texture and significant facial work, because when downloaded as is and rendered she looks just like a shiny haunted doll. Not only did I personally think she was unimpressive, but I felt like any work that I made with her would look would clash with the semi-realistic scene I’ve built.
That being said, Janine has wonderful facial controls. She is by Truong CG Artist so I really didn’t expect less than perfection in her rigging system. Therefore, I wanted to reserve my judgement of her appearance as much as possible because she has the controls that’ll help me succeed in animating this project, and that’s what’s most important. Janine is going to be my buddy over the next several weeks so it’s not my place to criticize her appearance.
I started trying out my phonemes with her and, although it’s not like Frankline’s phoneme system, it really is the next best thing. She’s got a separate jaw and chin control, guides for the corners of the mouth, full top lip and bottom lip controls as well as all the separate points on each lip, a control that just moves the whole mouth up and down, cheeks that move along with the jaw, a full set of tongue controls, and several different deformation controls for the mesh around the mouth, not to mention the lip stretch, squeeze, and pucker controls in the channel box editor. And so I decided that it was time to get to work with Janine.
The phonemes with Janine took longer than Franklin. The audio itself is almost four times as long, and I do have to shape each mouth pose myself. By the time I was done I’d completely burned myself out for the day, but I’m happy with the results and feel ready to proceed to the rest of the animation.
But being burned out from animation didn’t mean I was going to take the rest of the day off. I decided to use that time to give Janine a makeover, which I was going to end up doing sooner or later. I had a lot of fun with it. I’m not entirely confident yet in the Maya 3D texture brush, so what I did is I went into her texture files and I opened her skin document up in Photoshop. I composited HD skin textures onto it and I spent a while hand painting her eyes, lips, nose, and cheeks to give them some lifelike color. For her arms and legs I merely uploaded the same skin texture without hand painting. I composited an HD scan of green human eyes onto the eye texture file. For the hair, I wasn’t surprised to find that the mesh was editable, but I didn’t want to change it so much that the controls wouldn’t work, so I just made it a little bit less angular and helmet-like and I gave it a brown texture (which I also used for the eyebrows). I turned down the shine on every blinn shader. I didn’t edit the mesh of the clothes but gave them texture as well, keeping them similar but making the fabric look like something one might wear to a party in a mansion.
Now she looks less like a haunted doll and more like a suspicious, upper class party guest. I’m proudest of the nose.
Time to get ready to start blocking!