Lately I’ve been working on a new animated feature film, and going over some material from past movies to refresh my memory of the animation pipeline. In the short video above (12 minutes long) I describe my experience working on the Fox Studios’ live action feature film “Marmaduke“, animated at Cinesite in London back in 2009. As part of the development process I did a large number of expression sheets, a few of which I have uploaded below.
The purpose of the expression sheets was to help the modelling department create blend shapes for the character rigs, showing a range of expressions and moods, which could then be captured in the animation.
Dog noses are very expressive too. Dogs have a keen sense of smell, and their noses are constantly at work, sniffing out their surroundings.
At Cinesite we did over 650 talking dog shots. Our pipeline got very efficient (as you might imagine) with each animator getting very good at animal lipsync.
Lipsync & Dialogue Resources
Racoon Dialogue Short – Animated by Mark Masters |
We have many resources on animating dialogue and lipsync at Animation Apprentice. To find out more, follow the links below:
Lipsync – General Principles
- Why Animators Should Hold “M”s “B”s and “P”s for two frames
- Why Lipsync Should be “Two Frames Ahead”
- Why Lipsync Needs Wide and Narrow Mouth Shapes
- The Secret to Animating Dialogue and Lipsync
- Speed Lipsync – How to Animate Dialogue Fast
- Why Animators Should Open Wide on the Big Vowels
- Animating Lipsync – Why Animators Should Avoid Famous Lines of Dialogue
- How to Block Out and Animate a Dialogue Shot
- Why Animators (Usually) Leave Lipsync Until Last
- Lipsync Resource – The Sesame St Sound Archive
- Why Animators Need to “Hit The Accent”
- Why Animators Need “Head Muppeting”