Process and Production: 20th - 26th February 2017

I continued animating again after finishing shot 2, I moved to shot 4. This is where the man looks shocked and accidentally drops the ring while trying to catch it. 

The first half of this shot was going well. I believe that I used anticipation in a good way with him squashing down before bouncing up in shock. I'm happy with the expression and exaggeration of his face. The part that I struggled with however, was the second half of this shot. I continuously struggled to achieve a look of the arms moving up in an attempt to catch the ring that looked believable. I couldn't get anything to look right. The keys that I did just look unnatural.

I tried using reference footage but I was still finding it really hard to draw. I've decided I will come back to this particular shot since it is just frustrating me and I've spent too long trying to do this one already.

So I moved onto shot 5. This was one that I was quite excited to do and actually turned out better than I was expecting. I knew that I wanted to use some dynamic camera movements in this animation and this is the main one that shows this. I envisioned this being a very interesting slow motion shot. I created the ring spinning inside a symbol so that I could then rotate that outside to create an even more dynamic and natural spin. I used a simple circle stroke to create the ring as I could then squash it to create the angles I needed while keeping the line weight consistent. I only had to create half of this turn and then I copied and reversed these frames and tweaked the diamond to be on the other side as if it was going round the back. 

Then came some frame by frame lip syncing. To make this easier, I mapped out the timings of each phonetic sound on my labels layer corresponding to the audio. It was then as simple as drawing the mouth shapes and inbetweening them as I did for every other part. This turned out much better than I expected and when it plays out, I feel that it works well in sync with the audio.

The next shot I will be starting is shot 7 where my character tries to act casual as his girlfriend arrives at the table, this shot will involve more lip syncing and I think that the method I used here of mapping out the sounds with a label layer works very well and I will do this again in the upcoming shots.