Jay Gluckman - 11 Seconds Club - October 2022 - Work in Progress
For the pst couple years, I have "serious dabbling" in animation. This is a next step on my journey to learn to lip synch animation on the way to the bigger goal of digital story telling. This is the first time that I have submitted something for the 11 Second Club competition.
I started with creating some phoneme mouth shapes in Adobe Illustrator and using After Effects to time them with the audio. Then I got the idea of having a couple bats say the dialog. I was able to change the artwork in the Illustrator file and it automatically updated in After Effects. The mouth animation in After Effects was a bit "flappy" so I thought I would try to remake the scene in Blender. The bat mouths in the 3D Blender version is actually a torus that has been distorted and controlled using the wonderful shape keys tool in Blender. This is the first time that I have also tried using eyebrow movements to help the viewer read the emotions of the characters. It's interesting how tense the dialog gets with readable intense emotions in the eyes and eyebrows of the characters.