Project 3: Dialogue

My final project was a test of all the knowledge gained from previous assignments, from the pendulum swing to the lip-sync. The goal was to bring a character to life as (s)he lip-syncs to recorded audio and moves with expressive emotions and body language.

Due to its immense success and high entertainment value amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, I chose to animate a character from Animal Crossing: New Horzions. I also thought doing so would be a creative opportunity to breathe new life to these characters since, in the games, they don't speak any English and they have very limited body language due to their chibi designs. Before I started animating, I found audio provided by Anna Brisbin ("Brizzy Voices") in her YouTube video where she vocally impersonated many different Animal Crossing villagers, including the fan-favorite Raymond. After her recording for Raymond was spliced from YouTube, converted to an MP3, and edited in Audition to make her pauses feel more naturally paced, I drew many thumbnail sketches of Raymond and then a storyboard. I also recorded myself acting as the character, exaggerating a few movements his character would make (such as an eye roll and a push of the glasses) to use as references.

Using both the storyboard and the reference videos, the head was animated first frame by frame, followed by the eyes and two cat ears. Once the head was complete, the body was animated next, with the torso, arms and neck on separate layers. Glasses were animated next using few still frames that moved via puppet animation, with the key frame changing based on the angle Raymond was facing. Finally, the mouth was animated with the same time-framing technique from the previous lip sync assignment.

The most difficult part of this project was easing Raymond's head, body and arms as they slowed down or came to a resting point. I had to go back and either re-draw many frames or add new ones to ensure it looked like he was moving at a slightly exaggerated but more often realistic manner. The segments where Raymond sways to the viewer's left saying "I just want to be rich" was easily the most frustrating part since his whole body moves at a very quick speed in large curved angles. This required re-drawing or removing many chunks of animation to ensure his model was consistent and his movement still feeling somewhat natural. There were also phases where the head moved either out of sync with the body or appeared to be flying off the head, so both the head and neck needed to either have their individual frames altered or slide and rotate with puppet tools.

Assignment 6: Lip-Sync

The goal of this assignment was to develop an understanding for how to animate a character's mouth movements as (s)he lip syncs a certain amount of dialogue. The audio clip and character model were borrowed from a YouTuber named "Cellspex" in her video discussing Strange Magic (2015), which contained a lot of expressive hyperbole and sarcasm suitable for animation. Using VideoLan to splice the audio from the video and convert it into an MP3 file, I drew three key poses for Celly, colored them in a way similar to how her videos are presented, and spent the rest of time focusing on the lip-sync. After trial and error, I figured out the best way to animate an accurate sync was to listen to the audio and record a time frame for each sound that came from her mouth. As I went through the animation and noted each sound, I looked at myself in a mirror and imitated the sound, serving as a model for each key frame. I then drew the in-between frames and replayed the audio numerous times, checking and refining whenever the audio and mouth were slightly out of sync. Just to help viewers understand the context of the audio, I included film posters in the background and used puppet animation to reveal them.

Assignment 5: Head Turn

The purpose behind this animation was to make a character dramatically and clearly turn his head from one direction to another. Modeled after Legosi from the Beastars series, I initially drew 3 key-frames on paper before transferring them into Harmony, drew 3 main action frames in between, and then added all in-betweens. Through this experience, I learned that even the most subtle changes in a few frames can make an animation leave a much stronger impact. When I initially drew Legosi turn his head, it simply moved from left to right, so revisions were made to make his head follow a rather curved arc. Adding this made his character feel a lot less robotic and much more startled or surprised by whoever is speaking to him. Furthermore, the most difficult thing about this animation was the volume control, as some parts of Legosi's face (particularly his eyes and muzzle) appeared to pulse or rotate inconsistently with one another as his head turned.

Project 2: Walk Cycle

This project had the goal to create an animated walk cycle of a fictional character moving at a natural pace. I chose to animate Princess Daisy from the Super Mario franchise since she had a human-like design with some cartoon proportions, simple to do after the previous project proved to be difficult.

First, the contacts, "down" and "up" frames of Daisy's legs were sketched in Harmony, each drawn with a different color to avoid confusing one for the other. Once the legs were tweaked to look more consistent, I went up the body and drew the torso, then the arms (with different colors matching the sides of the legs), head, eyes and nose. I then drew all the in-betweens, using guidelines to ensure there was a visible push of the legs in the upward frames as Daisy walked. After a few tweaks to the legs, I animated the parts of Daisy's design whose movement depended on her bodily movements, such as her hair and a short dress based on what she wore in Mario Tennis (2000). It was planned from the beginning that she would hold a tennis racket on her left shoulder, so the racket was rotoscoped over a stock photo that moved via peg animation. A crown and earring, two of the more notable accessories on Daisy's design, were later animated with the same peg animation for greater model consistency.  Afterwards, a background was using gradients and pencil lines. Clouds were drawn on two separate layers that moved via pegs at different speeds to indicate a contrast in distance from Daisy. All layers linked to Daisy's cycle were grouped and then moved across the frame to showcase the cycle, making it appear as if she's heading home after a day at the tennis court.

The most difficult part about animating this project was the left arm and the racket she was holding. Not only was the racket a particular geometric shape that could easily be drawn inconsistently, but the movement of her hand and the handle created an illusion that she had a very loose grip and the racket slid up and down. I had to re-trace steps and animate many key frames and in-betweens repeatedly on both layers to make her grip look fixed.

Project 1: Weight

This was the first major animation project I worked on, and it took the most time and resources to complete at the time. The goal was to breathe life into a character as (s)he struggled to push, pull or lift an object of heavy weight, so I took the opportunity to animate Ori (the little one) and Naru (the heavy one), two characters from the Ori video game series. From the beginning, I wanted to use a jump-cut technique to show passage of time as Ori struggles to move Naru, which can allow me to animate a variety of different interactions with the weight. Possibly the biggest inspiration outside of Ori was the scene from Disney's Tangled (2010) where Rapunzel attempted to haul an unconscious Flynn Rider into her wardrobe. It was a scene that used the jump-cut technique to show many failed attempts with comedic effect, and so I thought it would be best to use this.

To complete the animation, I sketched concepts of the main ways Ori would push or pull Naru in Photoshop, imported them to Harmony, recorded references in which I would push against a wall to the point where'd I fall or slip, and then animate Ori doing the same, starting with key-frames and later adding in-betweens. To ensure the animation had a conclusion, the final segment where Ori looks at the sky and then falls asleep was animated earlier on before going back to the previous sequences. As I went back, I drew some frames of Ori in the same position and looped them similarly to when characters stood still in Ed, Edd N' Eddy, just to make it feel like motion occurs as Ori forces his body against Naru. The first segment in the animation where Ori squats down and pokes Naru was the final segment I animated, based on another reference I recorded, to give the project some introduction. Once all segments were complete, ears were animated on a separate layer as the final step since their movement was dependent on how Ori's head and body moved. Naru was also animated to show how heavy she is and make Ori's ground-pound deliver an impact, but one that isn't strong enough to wake her up. I also imported a background drawn in Adobe Photoshop to ensure there was visible contrast between the characters and the setting.

There were about three other ways Ori was initially going to push or pull Naru with, two of which already had references and parts I animated. However, they needed to be cut due to time constraints and difficulty with the perspective of the shot in one position. Thankfully, the end result is one I felt very proud of myself for.

Assignment 4B: Ori Gesture Sheet

This is a second gesture sheet based on the titular character of the 2015 video game, Ori and the Blind Forest. Unlike the previous sheet, the drawings in this one are the original rough sketches drawn on paper, as well as two drawn in Harmony during a class exercise. Ori conveys a lot of emotion through just its postures alone, and its anatomy and eyes complement the way I generally draw characters as a hobby. Because of all this, Ori is a character I would be willing to animate, though its dog-like legs and certain body parts that flow, such as the tail and the horn-like tuffs, appear to be a challenge.

Assignment 4A: Sandbag Gesture Sheet

This is a gesture sheet of a sack character based on the sandbag from the Super Smash Brothers series, initially drawn on paper, scanned, and drawn over again with line-art in Photoshop. The tiny limbs on the top and bottom of Axton serve as tiny arms and feet and he walks, waves hello, attempts to kick, or pushes himself up. Drawing him many times was relatively easy with the help of the guide-lines, breaking the anatomy down into quadrants that tell where the eyes, top and bottom should be drawn relative to one another. The more I drew him, the more familiar I got with how his body functioned and where the parts go,  though there were times I re-drew a certain pose just to ensure the model was consistent throughout.

Assignment 3: Hanging Object

The objective of this assignment was to animate a noun whose movement depends on an object it's attached to. I chose to roughly animate a character deploying a parachute that resembles Sly Cooper, as he would use a para-glider throughout his series of PlayStation games. Starting by making a simple sketch of the character to find basic model shapes for animating, I began the process by drawing key frames of Sly as he deployed the chute, reached the furthest points of his swings, and came to a resting place in the center as he glides. Given that Sly's movements would be dependent on how the parachute moves, I then animated the parachute first as it gets caught by the air and comes to a more stable gliding state. Afterwards, I drew some guidelines to represent the arc Sly would swing at and added more frames, going back and forth between key-frames and in-betweens to ensure he swings at a consistent arc. I finally added the strings to connect Sly with the chute. Animating this was a process that involved re-tracing steps many times, ensuring that Sly swung like a pendulum coming to a slow halt, the parachute's size didn't change too drastically, and Sly's legs swung naturally without losing model consistency.

Assignment 2: Bouncing Ball

This was the first animation I ever made in the ToonBoom Harmony software, and so crafting it proved to be a challenge. I wanted to adapt to the features of the program by animating a ball at high initial velocity bouncing around the objects of an urban alleyway at many different angles, similarly to the action of a pinball machine. All of the key objects were roughly sketched out, inked with the pencil tool, and arranged around the canvas before animating the ball. I frequently played with squash and stretch, even on stiff objects such as garbage cans, to make sure viewers felt the strong weight of the ball as it rams itself in.

In spite of the concept's simplicity for this animation, it was a very difficult procedure. There were a lot of situations where I had to completely redraw certain frames or entire sequences of frames to ensure the flow of the ball was smooth, fix layering issues, or make key objects look more polished and contrast with one another. It was a series of trial and error, to put it lightly, that resulted in my learning more about Harmony layers and pen. Almost 3-5 hours were spent just on cleaning up the layers to make the objects look properly spaced out.

Personal Assignment & Background: Fiesta Bowl Fan-Art

A large portion of my interest in animation comes from comic strips, cartoons and video games, all of which led me to draw fan-art as a hobby and influenced my design choices in many art courses. This is some of the most recent fan-art I had drawn of some of PlayStation's mascots, based on an image I saw of a child with the three at the PlayStation Fiesta Bowl in late 2019. From left to right, the mascots shown are Sly Cooper, Ratchet from the Ratchet & Clank series, and Crash Bandicoot. Each of the games they appear in have their designs and animations influenced by those of western cartoons.

The original photo from the Fiesta Bowl this fan-art is based on can be found here on the Instagram page of Cat Power Productions, the costume designers behind the mascots.

Who is this "Alex McMurray"?

Alexander Houston McMurray was born in Nashville, Tennessee and raised in Tampa, Florida. In 2018, he graduated from Brooks DeBartolo Collegiate High School with high honors. For two years, he served as a designer and the chief photographer for the school yearbook. For the rest of his term, he served as an independent photographer at many school events. He also dual-enrolled for a year and took courses in 2-D design and traditional photography at Hillsborough Community College.

Alex is currently a student at the University of Tampa who majors in graphic design, with possible interest in an animation minor. While there, he completed courses of 3-D design, illustration, frame assembly, experimental drawing, and graphic design. Presently, he is studying typography, intaglio printmaking, and 2-D animation.

Alex also manages the social media sites of Floor Coverings International, a flooring industry branch owned and operated by his family. He has designed advertisements for the company that were published in the monthly World of Westchase magazine for several years. Ever since then, he enjoys working with Adobe creative software and continues to strengthen his skill and abilities each day.

Outside of education and work, Alex enjoys using this software to illustrate characters mostly associated with film, animation and video games he enjoys. Doing so inspires him towards graphic design, as he hopes to contribute in those fields of expertise someday. Though he is just starting out, he is eager to see where his path in life will go.