Work to Live. Don't Live to Work. Enjoy the time you have.

It's always important to try and have a little fun with friends and colleagues during stressful times at work.  This is especially true for production type environments.  I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the fun moments that were caught while filming reference for Civ Revolution, and Pirates.  This is several years old now, but full of fun memories.  Development of a game takes years and these fleeting moments of animator high jinks are just an eye blink in the big picture of what was going on, but it helps keep things in perspective.  Don't take work too seriously.  :)

I should also note for animators, and anyone that has interest, just how powerful and fun filming video reference is.  You quite literally get to play any character you ever wanted.  You get to test your ideas and see which ones are good and which ones can be thrown out.  There is a creative release, and it helps get you out of nasty little spells of creative fatigue.  It's good all around in my book.

Watch:

Peter Lip Sync Test

Back in 2011 I was watching a fantastic training video by animator Kenny Roy involving his approach to animating lip sync.  His lesson was really useful and helped me begin to improve how I deal with dialogue.
I started with animating the open/closed state of the mouth throughout the dialogue.  Paying attention to hit certain accents.  Then I addressed the wide/narrow positions of the mouth corners.  Finally I moved to the lip controls themselves to create supportive shapes for clarity.  I tried to lead each thing being said by a couple frames so that your eye could have time to process what was being said.

Here is Part 1 showing only animated facial controls to try and hit the dialogue:




Here is Part 2 showing a little animation on the head to see how the facial movements will hold up:




Here is Part 3 showing my early animation blocking pass with the lip sync.  I felt like it was a good start.  It's a little odd to watch out of the greater context of the scene this shot was meant to fit into, but I'm still happy with the blocking.



Sadly, this animation had to be abandoned for a variety of reasons.  It was, however, a good learning experience and a lot of my recent work has benefited from time spent learning a new way to approach animating lip sync.

Hope this helps someone.