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.
