Living Voices

Fina character ideas

For this project, I have decided to use a sound of dialogue from the musical „Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” by Anita Loos. I immediately started by creating a mood board, my idea was to create a background and characters in old Hollywood style. Then I started by designing the lady character. For this character, I had three ideas with different hairstyles and dresses which were inspired by Merlin Monroe who, played in this movie and in my animation is the voice of the lady character. After I have decided on one of my characters, I then started to design the character of two men.  I wanted to draw my characters as very skinny except for the old man which supposed to be an angry gentleman who wants to argue all the time. I wanted to create a difference in height between an old gentleman and the other two characters. Then I started to draw storyboards, I wanted to have characters inside the restaurant, and I wanted to focus on changing the perspective of the camera and draw a lot of close-ups to make the animation interesting.  I also wanted to change the camera to make the argument more dynamic. Later on, I started designing my background. I was very inspired by the early 70s interior designs of the pubs. I have decided to use the colour red and tried to draw a detailed background but not too much to not be very distractive. I draw also different angles of the background. I then started to plan my animation by x sheet which was very helpful to visualise the result and also the movement of the lips. I then started to draw rough sketches in Troon boom. I have never used troon boom before and at the beginning, I was having a hard time managing the program. However, the more I used the program I was got more comfortable drawing and experimenting with this program. The rough sketches took me a very long time, as I started with drawing a skeleton of the characters which was a big mistake because it turned out of wasting time because I had to draw again the outline of the characters which I could do at the beginning. When I was happy with the movement of the characters and rough sketches, I then started to draw outlines. This process was very hard for me as I wanted to create more movement and dynamic, however, I had to change my plan as I could draw characters from different perspectives, which I will definitely need to work on it. When I finished, the outline I decided to add colour. After I coloured my animation, I then started to animate lip sync. It was my first time as well, so this part took me a long time to create a smooth animation of lip sync. From this part, I am the proudest, because I think that lips are perfectly synchronised to the sound and I enjoyed making the smooth movement. Later I added the background that I drew before, and I finished the animation. In conclusion, I am very happy with the results, especially the changing of the perspective and camera that shows the dynamic of the dialogue although the characters were supposed to move a little bit more. I am also very happy with the character’s design which I think perfectly shows the main theme which was old Hollywood. I think that I would need to change the movement of the characters to make the animation look more interesting. I like the colour palette and how the characters are contrasting to the background as the characters are painted in more light colours, however, the background is very strong and bold. With these new experiences, I am happy to experiment more in this program and improve myself with the movement of the body. I am happy that my vision for this animation was realised from the beginning to the end, and I think this animation beautifully shows the lip-sync which was the main criterion of this animation.