Happy New Year! I’ve not managed to create a blog post recently as I’ve been working on a caricature piece of my brother and his friend, the reason I didn’t upload it here straight away was because I framed the image and gave it to him as a Christmas present, and now that Christmas is over and we’re in 2013 I thought I’d share the final result. The image size is smaller than my previous submissions as I had to alter the size for it to fit into a frame. I drew on the most prominent features so they would stand out and give a better cartoon look, the background is an actual image of the pub they run with a ‘cutout’ filter. With these characters now drawn I can use them to create an advertisement/commercial for the pub that my brother (character on the right) commisioned me to do to promote the pub.

Here it is framed:

This is the final completed birthday animation. The whole video is in reference to a mashup video and an ‘in-joke’ I shared with Brad, that video can be seen here. I wanted the keep the beard a secret until the final animation was up, I feel it adds more humor to the scene and I am happy with the animation of the growth, I used traditional animation for it rather than a tween, each frame I had to add more and more little hairs to it, but I believe it was worth it.

Here is a test animation I created just to see how I would animate chewing, this was my first ever attempt, I want the cheeks to stretch more as I want more emphasis on how much cake is in his mouth. I will experiment with circles to create the desired effect.

This took me all day to complete. Bradley here is about to tuck into his birthday cake, I wanted to make the face as silly and “derp” as possible. In the actual animation this scene only lasts one second, but I extended it for this image just so we could see the facial animations a lot more. 

Today I did the lip syncing to my birthday animation. I recorded myself saying “BIRTHDAY CAKE!” in a loud fun voice, it took several attempts to get the mouths right as the mouth shapes are different to normal speech. I will now animate the rest of the face such as the eyes and the eyebrows, as currently it looks very frozen.

Just an update on the Birthday animation I’m currently working on, I’ve coloured the scene and recorded the audio, because of my schedule I have just re-used props from previous birthday animations, I am now going to start the actual animation and lip syncing.

One last Birthday animation before I get back to my own projects. Here is the inital character design, again, based from an actual photo, and I have the idea for the animation mapped out in my head.

Here is the final birthday animation, it took a little under three days but I am proud of the end result, I believe my lip syncing has significantly improved and adding more animations, however small they are, really works well together and detail will be something I will further concentrate on in future animations. I also think I have captured my friends likeness down to a tee.

To cut down on the lip syncing (not lazy, just so I could upload it in time for his birthday… honest) I was going to use a few different cutaways, I knew one would be a birthday card that would cover the mouth. The design would consist of a paisley background, a pattern my friend always wears, and another drawing of Mike, this time being in the shape of the number one in ‘21’, which is a perfect shape for Mike as his extravagant features fit well with this shape: long and thin, large nose point and a point at the bottom.

This is an animation test of the character, just to see if everything looked good. I wanted to have the eyes close and the arms move in time and believe it has worked sucessfull and now I am confident to animated the lip sync on top of this.