Acting out the scene

This is the scene I am now concentrating on. I've had a frustrating time over the last week as Maya has repeatedly been crashing on me. I've had to go back to an old save from this scene to continue with my work. The clip starts at 1:39....

I acted it out to try and get more of a feel for the scene. First as Hrundi....

And then as Bill...

Withnail & I - 'Bar Scene'

Initially I decided to work on a scene from Withnail & I, in which they upset a local drinker and almost get into a fight. I felt this had good action, tension, comedy and a range of emotions which would be good to try and animate.

Here is a playblast of my first attempt in lip syncing Withnail:

And the rendered out version:

Lip-sync test

This is a first test using the Morpheus facial setup to attempt lip syncing using the clip given to us by Mike   to experiment with.

I felt that it went ok for a first test, however the feedback in my formative was that the lips were too flappy  and I agree with this. The movements need to be snappier and actually not so pronounced either.

The important thing is that I  have learnt from this exercise, and can now improve on it when I come to animate the lip sync within my scene.

Lip-sync research - The basics

The four basic shapes the mouth makes are open/closed and wide/narrow.

That's it really. When lip-syncing a character with a plain circle for a mouth, the shapes in Figure 1.2 are all that’s needed to create the illusion of speech. This is the bare-bones of the method without all the detailed lip-curling for specific letter sounds such as 'F'.

"Animating lip sync is all illusion. What would really be happening isn’t nearly as relevant as the impression of what is happening. How about M? You may be thinking, “I need to roll my lips in together to say M, and I can’t do that with a wide-narrow-mouth-thing- amajig.” Sure you can, or at least you can give the impression in motion that the lips are rolled in—just close the mouth all the way—and that’s usually going to be good enough."  

Jason Osipa, Author of 'Stop Staring'

This is the issue I was having with my first tests of lip-syncing. I was recording myself in Photo Booth overpronunciating each word, then trying to animate in Maya. This made it look over the top and unrealistic. Here is an example below.

Storyboard

This is a basic storyboard for my scene. I went through and highlighted the different camera shots, from an initial 3-person introductory shot to the close-ups as the conversation goes back and forth and becomes more heated and tense.

There isn't much physical acting in my clip, it is more about the emotions and expressions on the characters faces, so my shots will focus on mid-close up shots of the characters.