Kiwi Made

I have managed to succesfully complete the animation of the characters for each shot (including lip syncing and blinks), sorting the sound effects, music and voices for the episode and also rendering it out to a complete animation!

Screenshot of title sequence for Kiwianna.

I ended up getting my daughter, Gabby and one of her friends, Taylor to voice the characters Pipi and Tuibelle. I made sure that they used their normal every day voices, so that they definitely sounded authentically "Kiwi". My voice actor for Fernell was unavailable at the last minute, so I voiced that character and Steven Moseley was the voice for Terrence (the old man). I recorded the sound with the help of one of my course mates Seth James. We recorded a few takes and then I picked the take of each character that I liked best to use. I put these pieces of dialogue into my Premiere Pro project and matched them up to the shots that they belonged with, then exported the audio sequence out just for that shot. This enabled me to import the audio into my Toonboom scene to lip sync the characters.

Once the lip syncing was complete, I added blinks to the characters which was not a huge job. I needed to get the timing right and not put too many blinks in otherwise the characters look like that is all they are doing the entire time.

I used online websites with free sound effects and SIT's sound effects library to find the effects I was looking for. Putting in the sound effects after the animation was done, gave me quite a few issues. It was very difficult trying to match the sound effects with the action and I know why we should always do the sound first - to make our lives easier!!!!! I found a cool piece of music to use for the title sequence and the credits on a free music website and then all that was left to do was make the title sequence and put some credits on the end.

Glitched out animation.

My render time for my complete animation was only a few minutes because 2D does not take anywhere near as long as 3D animation to render. Once it rendered I played it through and to my disappointment something had gone when the sound had rendered out. Pieces of dialogue were playing in the wrong place. I checked my Premiere Pro project and there was nothing there that shouldn't have been there, so in the end I deleted out the shots that were having issues and imported those shots again, put them back into the workspace and this fixed the problem. My class mates got to have a good laugh at the glitch in my animation, so watch it and you might see why!