Assets & Cells

I have made assets and cell replacements for my characters. The cell replacements are for the blink cycles and mouth shapes for lip syncing. All of the characters needed top blink to help them not to look creepy. Each character has an already completely open eye as a default, so I created a half open eye and a closed eye for each character. The blink cycles were made up from these different cells. One blink cycle starts with an open eye, changes to a half open eye, to a closed eye, back to a half open eye and ends with a fully open eye.

Screenshot of different eye stages for blink.

There are only four characters that have dialogue that I need to lip sync, so I only have to draw mouth shapes for those particular characters. When you lip sync, you have to do what is called a dope sheet. This means you need to scrub through the dialogue and work out what the major word sounds are and work out how many frames those sounds are heard over - putting this information into the dope sheet as a reference. The next step is to put each mouth shape that is required into the right frames. If you animate every single little word sound it looks as though the character is furiously moving their mouth and less like they are actually talking so only animating the major word sounds stops this from happening.

There were only a couple of assets that I needed to create. I created fishing rods, a walking stick for Terrence and a dumbell for Wendy. These were created as character props.

Screen shot of Terrence with his walking stick.

 The next things to get done are to put each shot together by putting everything required for each shot into the same file. The library system in Toonboom Harmony makes this job a whole lot easier.