Character Animator Tips & Tricks (March 2018)

[Music] hey s : this is David from the Dobie character animator team and welcome to the March episode of tips and tricks this month we'll start off with a community spotlight which includes a Film Festival finalist from Australia and some great examples of using character animator for kids educational content then we'll spend the bulk of the time on the second part of the Evan flamethrower behind the scenes so this time we'll be focusing on the production process recording editing compositing and all of that stuff with character animator and After Effects there's a lot to get into so let's get started starting off this month we have rock bottom by seek and hide productions this was created using character animator and After Effects by Nick Baker and Tristan Kline who are two friends who originally met in school in Australia and they ended up winning second place in the Trop fest film competition this is a huge outdoor festival where independent films are screened and judged live in front of 50,000 people and it's a funny short film about these little off-color animated bugs and the thing that stands out to me the most is this style it's a beautiful hand illustrated style with really detailed backgrounds and excellent character designs you know a lot of times you don't see this much detail in 2d animation right where they used to simpler flat assets but I'd love seeing art like this in motion and I think it works really well for what they're going for now that he's a famous Award winner I asked Tristan for his advice to people just starting out with animation and he said just try I've never felt like I've had any animation skills but with tools out there these days like a character animator and After Effects almost anyone can do it so there you have it get together with your friends you've met at school make a film put it in a competition and you too could win so excellent work guys and I look forward to seeing your future videos next I wanted to focus on three really great kid base channels that I've seen recently that are all using character animator and interesting ways the first is socratic a Kids this is a mix of real-life puppets with animated puppets and it's a great format that works really well for explaining concepts to kids like learning about the moon or how a battery works and you've got these little physical puppet hosts who are consistent you know you got frog or a fox or a monster but then they meet all these new characters that are animated in character animator to teach about new concepts it's a great smart format that works really well and they're doing a great job with it next is goo ko asado this is important fortunately I don't understand what they're saying but it's a really well-done Channel it's this little purple haired guy and his dog explaining things to kids and the character emotion is great the colors are great and the compositing is excellent they use After Effects really well to add all these foreground and background elements and special effects have these you know fun backgrounds have dinosaurs walking behind the characters what whatever it's a really it's really geared towards a kid audience in a perfect way so excellent work there as well and finally we have body town this is a Spanish based series that teaches kids about what's going on in their body and these characters are relatively simple but it's pretty amazing what expressiveness they can get with just the eyes mouths and these stringy arms they have they've also done a lot with cross media stuff where they've actually published several books with these characters as well so kids can read about them see the characters and then hear them and see them come to life on line so no matter what the medium these guys are in it's a great concept and last up we have Marc Simon who has created a great comprehensive lynda.com course about character animator it clocks in at 4 hours and 48 minutes worth of stuff and covers everything from storyboarding to rigging recording life workflows and basically anything you can think of is in there Marcus actually made this course free for the month of March 2018 so you can go and check it out and he put together a little message for us as well hi Dave I'm mark Simon hey thank you so much for all the great videos you've done on character animator they have inspired me to create an entire course on lynda.com on how to use character animator in production there are over 80 videos in my course and that's almost 5 hours of content but luckily they're broken into quick little chunks and we have five new characters built just for this course including hand-drawn hi there photo cops claymation and CG just go to lynda.com forward slash mark Simon hey so thanks again Dave oh that burns alright so this month we continue our behind-the-scenes look at evan flamethrower robot detective this is a video that I'm putting together that's using character animator and After Effects audition Photoshop everything basically to create a long-form interactive cartoon so last month we talked about pre-production doing your voiceover getting your characters together thinking up with the story and this month we're talking about production recording editing dynamic link into After Effects for compositing hopefully there's a lot of useful tips here for your own creations so let's get into it okay I've got a character ready to go and start a recording with so what's the first step well first make sure you've got a scene that has a lot of room for your character to move around in so when I select my scene over here in the project panel I can see the width and height frame rate all of that stuff if I need a little extra room I can always make this bigger or smaller to give it enough space you don't want your character's head or body or arms getting cut off by the sides because then when you bring it into After Effects or premiere or other places it's going to show very clearly where it gets cut off so always give yourself character a lot of extra space this doesn't have to be a particular aspect ratio or anything like that it just needs to be a lot of space so the place I always start with with recording animation and character animator is audio audio determines everything how the character is going to react to things what their emotions will be what gestures or triggers you want to do at any given time it's all dependent on the audio now if I bring in a full mix with everything that this character is saying it's not going to work too well this is not what I want to do but I'm going to show you why I wouldn't want to do this so I'm gonna drag it in it's got the background music it's got Suzanne talking to Evan it's got multiple voices in it and then if I wanted to compute her lip-sync I would just go to have her selected and go to timeline compute lip-sync from scene audio and that analyzes the audio that is currently in the scene and is going to make her mouth shapes based off of that the problem though is that it analyzed the music and Evans voice too so it's going to look terrible something like this so this is not the way I wanted to do it it was doing the audio it all the audio together at once I need to isolate just Suzanne's voice so remember last month we were talking about okay I've got Evan all of his voice up here Suzanne all of her voice here extra characters there's a few throwaway gags with other characters down here and the soundtrack for Suzanne I want to mute everything else just have Suzanne the only voice showing up and go to file export multitrack mix down entire session and so I important just that file into character animator dragging into my scene and you can see by the waveform that it's only her parts where she's talking now one other thing I should note is she has kind of a robotic filter on her voice this version I took that filter off and the reason for that is any filtering or weird effects that you add to a character's voice may affect the quality of the lip-sync I was noticing when I first brought it in I didn't get that great result you know great of results but when I took the filter off and made it loud and clear and everything it was much much better so keep with the current version first that the most clean raw loud version you can get first and then later on you can bring back the old one and even if it has a filter a pitch shift or something like that it should still line up okay so again for her I would select her and go to timeline compute lip-sync from scene audio and it will go through that whole process now once that's done what I like to do is make sure just the audio file is selected not the visions the lip-sync data and delete it and then bring Bratt back in the whole mixed audio okay so in this case I think it's Suzanne Mix all my naming conventions are terrible but whatever and now when I play back [Music] so this works great because now I've extracted the lip-sync data just for this character but I can hear everything else that's happening and react and animate the character accordingly so this is the typical workflow I'll always do do the lip-sync first isolate just the individual voice and then bring back in everything to listen to now some characters might not have the conventional mouth set this guy for example hack bot 800 has a nutcracker jaw and that was the Nutcracker draw behavior added rotation clockwise so it kind of does that little pivoting thing that's happening there if I wanted to do the isolated audio for this guy what I would do is turn off camera input actually turn everything else off which I'm going to disarm by holding down command as I click on a red dot I believe that's control on PC command on Mac and when you do that it's going to turn armed or disarmed everything at the same time so I'm gonna disarm everything just armed Nutcracker jaw and audio input and then basically I'm just gonna press record and play this back and let the audio record and respond the nutcrackers all audio respond to the audio that's playing back so this looks good so I'll press record that can't say I'm surprised to see you're still a and so on and so forth so in this case I don't care about this extra audio that was used to get kind of the amplitude for the jaw moving up and down so I'm just gonna delete that but what it does give me is this new bar right here for Nutcracker jaw audio input and that is what I care about and so if I play this back that can't say I'm surprised to see you're still a now the job wasn't moving as much as I maybe would have liked so what I'm going to do is change the audio flap enos to something like 150 let's see if that looks any better I can't say I'm surprised to see you're still a so that's looking pretty good I might do some manual camera adjustments as well so if I disarm audio turn camera on and then you know basically voice over what the character is saying so let's try this I can't say I'm surprised to see you're still a now I've got some additional data again I can get rid of this throwaway waveform but I've got a camera and audio input both determining what the nut cracker jaw is going to look like so I can try a little bit of each see what works maybe I only need the camera for this one section that didn't you know turn out too well that sort of thing so you can kind of tweak and play around with these parameters are mean and disarming individual things for your needs so before I go too much further I'm gonna focus on editing the lip-sync now when I'm editing I don't want any of this live data like we're currently seen coming in so the best way to deal with that is disarm the puppet by just clicking the red dot next to them now this is only going to show me the recorded data and nothing else that's currently live now generally what I'll do is play everything back and if I notice a mouth that looks out of sorts you know something that's held on for too long or a mouth that flickers too quickly or the wrong mouth shape for what seems like you know a particular sound then I'll stop and just do a gradual you know trial and error to figure out what is the right mouth shape for this sound and it really is for me at least who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about fixing lip sync it really is a trial and error process so let's take this example she's talking about coffee here and let's see what she says so I noticed you some of a peppermint latte with extra foam and right here this a sound holds on for a little bit too long I think I think it she starts to transition to a whiff sound instead let's hear that one more time that doesn't feel right if I want to make it even easier and more to work with I can go to playback speed here if I just click this little number meanwhile go to half speed instead and play it back and this makes it a little bit easier to work with [Music] and it also has the added bonus of sounding completely ridiculous but for this character right here I think is where she starts to stay and I can see in the waveform here as well that there seems to be an another vision that I want to add in here so with my time lined up here I'm going to make sure that vizima is selected and I'm going to go to edit split and that is going to create a new vision it's the same one currently still ah but what I can do now is right-click it and find exactly the one that I want to replace it now in this case even though she's saying with I don't think the whoa sound is what I want I think instead I want that with the sound instead so I'm actually going to try out this L it says that first sound is what I'm going for so let's give that a try and see how it looks that looks pretty good I could probably do a little bit of revision but I think it's it's close enough that is good so this is the general process listen through watch your whole performance when you see something that looks a little out of sorts stop do a little trial and error try out some different things it's really easy to just right-click and try some different things drag these to change the timing of them so they happen a little bit earlier later and it's just a you know continual process and eventually you should get some really great results alright so with the mouth done the next thing I'll usually move on to is the rest of the face so this includes head movements eyebrows pupils moving triggers for the face all of that stuff to get a convincing emotion and expression from the face that's normally where people are looking to get the main emotion from a character and then I'll build on top of that with dragger and some other stuff later so the first thing I'll do is the face now face if you arm this and turn everything else off it controls quite a few things it controls head movement it controls your eyebrows as well as blinking so what I'll usually do is turn a recording speed down to about 3/4 this gives me a little bit of extra time to react to what's being said and then my movements will also when played back a full speed look a little bit faster and more fluid so I'll show you just a quick example about how I might go about this okay so take that same basic concept and now look at here's a finished version of a full twelve minutes or so that I've recorded with Suzanne x3 now her timeline is incredibly complex there is a lot going on here let me actually drag this up so we can see a little bit more and if I open up face camera input you'll see what I've done is for each section each little scene each little vignette that this character is speaking in I'll record you know a minute a minute and a half worth of my head moving back and forth and reacting to different things if I get something wrong I'll usually just stop and go start over again but and try to get it right and you know after a few different times and performances you do tend to get it right and it goes pretty fast and you know what to react to what things you're going to be listening to and when you should you know move back to recoil at something or when you should lean in to feel like you're getting more information or when your eyebrow should go up or down so it's just a practice and performance thing and you know it might take a couple tries but eventually you get that take that works really well for your scene the next thing I usually tackle is the eye gaze behavior so again I will just arm that and a lot of times instead of the default camera input I disarm that and I only armed keyboard input and I feel like this gives me the most control over where my character is looking at any given time so what I'll do is press record usually again if 3/4 a slow motion recording speed and I will press the arrow keys on the keyboard to determine where my character is looking so I'm pressing right left down up or Det diagonally will allow your character to look in the different corners and as I'm listening to the performance I'm kind of thinking is she you know collecting her thoughts maybe she's looking down while she's thinking about something or she's annoyed by something kind of rolling her eyes a little bit you know I'm just reacting to the performance of thinking where would I be looking or what would I'd be doing as I'm looking around and with the arrow keys I can be very precise on you know when she's looking one way the other and for me that's worked really well so again let's jump ahead and see what a finished I gaze recorded performance might look like so I'm gonna twirl this down and you see a huge staircase of things happening here and what you'll notice is one take actually is this really really long take and what I found out was you know the character is always looking to one side for the most part by default she's always looking towards Evan flame thrower who was asking her questions and so I just did one take I basically recorded it for like three seconds with just her looking towards the right the right side of the screen I should say and then I just dragged the out point of that take so it extended all the way throughout the entire take and then on top of that I added additional recordings to punctuate certain moments so that's a nice thing about any of these takes is you can just kind of drag over at the out point and when you see these little it's very subtle but you sees a little diagonal lines that just means that that last frame is being held and it's just continuing off into however long something goes so this is a great way to you know hold a particular pose whatever that lasts a first or last element in your take is you can extend it a little bit longer if you want to hold it for a specific effect so the last thing I'll deal with focused on the face are any face related triggers so in this case I just have a couple of eye things for this character if I press one she does this half eyelid thing if I press B she closes her eyes and and does it as an extended trigger demand blink and so it's the same cycle I'm recording at three-quarter speed I'm thinking about where she would be closing her eyes or having them kind of half open and using that to accentuate a particular emotion or moment so again going to the finished example whatever you name a trigger that's what's going to show up here in the timeline so for example the half-open eyelids I called half that's what shows up here when I trow this open again I get this staircase every take that I've done every time I press record and record again to stop it creates this track now even if I didn't get the timing a hundred percent right that's okay because I can go into any of these triggers and drag they're in or out points to change exactly where they begin or end now I also have the ability to add new triggers if I right-click into any of these blank areas I am able to add a new trigger there and can again extend it as I need to so really you know once you've got one trigger track you could just right click all all through the entire track and place new ones manually that way instead of recording a performance so you have a few different ways of doing it but both lead to the same result of being able to have frame-by-frame precise triggers now that the face is done the next thing I usually move on to our arm movements and these are done for these characters with the dragger behavior so I've got dragged or armed here and that just means I'm able to drag with the mouse to move them around now typically the way I'll start is having each character with kind of their rest post their default pose so for Suzanne's case it's with her hands on her hips and I kind of want to just keep this as for her primary position this is kind of always where she's going to go back to so what I'll do is set that hit record and that gives me a take for each of those arms the left and the right now what I have the ability to do is if i disarm this I will see her within her default position I can zoom out by pressing the minus key and I'm just going to extend this for the whole duration of the performance meaning now every part of her performance she's got these arms her hands on her hips and that's her default position and then what I'm going to do is do little arm movements and gestures that will always go back to that resting position and blend into them all right so here's the scene where she is going to point at Evan and demand that you know have you found my money yet so something like this now here's a problem when I armed the dryer behavior again her arms go back to the position they were in when she was imported right and in general this is the right way we say normally you probably want to import your character with their arms in an a position that gives you the most flexibility but the problem here is now I don't remember where those aren't hands were on our hips and I can't react to that the nice thing though is you can add additional dragger behaviors to keep that current underlying data but then record another take over top of it so the way I would do that is go into the puppet so I will double click Suzanne and then with this top level selected I'm going to go over to the behaviors plus add a new dragger behavior and call it whatever I want by clicking this little menu icon so I could call this you know left arm right arm you know gestures whatever I want to do so going back to the scene for this one part where I want her to be pointing at Evan I am going to instead disarm dragger which will show me the hands on the hips again the default one that I extended all the way across the time line and instead arm drag hands and notice the hands are still on the hip because I've disarmed the behavior that those were recorded in now with drag hands I am able to do a recorded performance of one arm both arms move and I can do whatever I want over top of it the one thing I'll do with arms is I almost always record at 50% recording speed our movements typically are pretty quick you move around a lot and for me I found 50% gives me the best results and allows me to react to the voiceover that I'm hearing as well all right so let's give this a try [Music] so now I have this second take that's over top of that initial underlying take and what I'll always do is use these little blend handles just to blend one performance into the next to make it feel a little bit smoother and now play back and that looks pretty good I can change the timing of course if I want it to be a little bit you know quicker here at the end I might drag in that outpoint and make the curve a little bit more steep but you can fool around with this and get it precise to make those arm movements as quick as possible and so what you see in the final version is exactly what I just did repeated a hundred times right so here dragger is this long extended take or two or three takes very long just the hands on the hips and then the drag hands over top of it is a much more a much bigger staircase of small little edits that are over top of it that are adding precise gestures are movements points that sort of thing over top and blending into that initial performance and then the last thing we'll move on to our hand triggers so for this character she's got quite a few different hand triggers palm flips points that sort of thing and what I tried to do is hide these transitions of when a hand changes so if I just did this right now it's very obvious that it's changing into a point instead what I tried to do is hide it when the arm is moving in the hand has some motion to it so here I might hide it right at this point when the arm is on its upward trajectory so let me try to record a performance with this and then I'll let go on its way down now if I didn't get that a hundred percent right I do have the ability to change the in and out point to get it to precisely the right location that I need but that's in general what I'll do is I'll hide if the hand is off-screen like if it's behind the characters saying like that then it's easy you can just swap it there but if it's moving and having some motions or you want to transition from an open palm to a point or a thumbs up or peace sign or whatever do it when the arm is moving to kind of hide that transition it makes it look a little bit smoother and that's it so really all I'm doing is taking one behavior at a time focusing on that getting the head just right getting the eyes just right getting the arm movements whatever just right and then blending and adding performances and slowly you'll see your characters start to come together come to life right in front of your eyes now you could do all this at once you could arm everything and just say press record and go for it and there's your performance and that's totally fine that's definitely one way to do it and then make little edits on top of that for me though I felt like when I am I feel like I get the most emotion and the best results when I'm focused on one performance at a time and keep layering them on top of each other once I have multiple character performances down I can start to composite them and after-effects and because I'm using the same audio track the same timing everything should line up great now the way I'm going to bring them in is by importing through dynamic link so I would just in my project panel over here I'm gonna press command I on Mac that's control I on Windows I'm gonna fly it find the CH proj file the character animator project file open that up and when I do that it's gonna give me a list of all the different scenes that are in that project so if you've named things correctly unlike me you'll be able to find exactly what that scene was that you want to bring in so let's say annoying bot here I want to bring him in so I press ok and that makes him show up over here in my project panel and then I can just drag that into my After Effects composition and there we go and now I can position him wherever I want to so really that's all there is to it I'm just importing a lot of different i'ma clinked characters putting them together and they imported images and PSD files and whatnot I'm creating this scene in this world around them putting a desk in front of this character to make it look like he's behind it adding a blurred lamp in the foreground to give some slight depth of field that sort of thing and one thing I always spend a decent amount of time on is trying to get a little bit of extra atmosphere for the scenes so instead of it feeling kind of flat and lifeless adding a little bit of dimension and color to it so one of the easiest ways to do this is immediately adding shadows to a character so if you duplicate your dynamically linked you know character animator puppet you can bring it in so I've got this second version that's duplicated below this guy and then I just went to effect color correction curves and I'm just gonna drag this all the way down to the bottom right that makes it turn black I'm gonna press T overtop of this to bring up in the timeline to bring up opacity change that to 15% and I'm done and you get this nice little shadow that's behind the character I could not you know make that go up or down in transparency for whatever I want but that immediately gives a little bit of sense of the depth to the character and makes them feel a little bit more connected to their surroundings after this scene add a few other things so I've got some light coming out of this it's just a shape layer that's blue I think that I made a add blend mode to that makes it feel like it has a little bit of extra light and difference in there I also found this dust particle mat that I overlaid as well I think I must used add blend mode for that too and that just has these little you know pieces of dust that are subtly floating through the air and again makes the background and environment come to life a little bit it makes something always moving always kinetic in there which I think helps give it a little bit of additional atmosphere and I like the little blue lighting that this is adding as well and then I also did just a black and white gradient overlay kind of a vignette that it put over top of it and I was fooling around with the different blend modes but this is the one I think I ended up liking the most was a linear burn and you know he could of course changed the transparency here to not be as dramatic if you wanted just a little bit more shading but you get the idea you add these little elements these colors these these you know looping background mat animations over top of your environment and it really helps bring everything to life and add some shadow and highlight and depth and light and dimension to everything so this was looking pretty good but this is just one shot the nice thing that a dynamic linked character animator performance allows me to do is have that same character in a different shot so I could do just a you know close-up version of them or a close-up of the person they're talking to and then what I could do is create a comp where I am basically editing back and forth between these different shots so they're talking here and then they move into him talking and then goes to Evan and then back to hack bot and then back to the wide shot and you get the idea it's you know you could do this in Premiere as well I'm doing in After Effects because this is an weird interactive video and it's a little bit easier for me to do it within After Effects itself but basically you're just switching between different shots back and forth and you you don't really have to do anything as long as the timing as long as everything starts and ends at the same time it's really easy to line these up and edit between these different shots now this is starting to become a really really complicated scene there is if there are a lot of elements here and so when I'm previewing and working After Effects because there's so much going on sometimes it can render pretty slowly what I have ended up doing a lot for this project is under the preview area making sure I'm skipping every two frames makes it you know a little bit quicker to render and resolution sometimes I'll go to half 3rd quarter I've even gone to custom and done you know eight pixels or something like that just to make it able to play back a little faster so right now I'm seeing a preview and it's much more pixelated but I can still get a general idea of what the characters are saying and doing and it's enough for me to be able to make some edits and choices and some stylistic effects that I might add and this may seem a little complicated overwhelming but honestly this is mostly after-effects 101 type stuff if you watch an introductory youtube tutorial and After Effects if you don't know too much about it and just learn about transform Oh Cassity rotation scale how to ease things in and out of each other how to you know comp and pre-comp and all of that stuff just basic After Effects stuff honestly that is all you really need to know to do something like this it's all a matter of moving these different elements around and having them work and react to each other in believable ways so that's it this isn't a project that I would never have been able to do you know two or three years ago it's just the character animation tools I have been used to just felt too cumbersome and complex and scary basically to get into something like this and I think character animator has really made it feel a lot more accessible and easy and natural for me to kind of put these character performances together and then composite them with a basic understanding of After Effects so I'm still hard at work at this I hope it comes out in the next month or so but I'm having a blast putting it together and I hope it was helpful for you to watch me walk through it as well alright that's it for this month thank you very much for watching and as usual if you have anything you've created with character animator and want to share it with the rest of the character animator team please do hashtag character animator on Twitter or Instagram is where we're normally checking that stuff out and if you run into any issues bug reports problems with your puppets the best place to get help are the official character animator forums that's it for this month thank you very much for watching and have fun

Channel: Okay Samurai

Views: 43,668

Keywords: adobe, character animator, tutorial, tips, tricks, animation, animate, after effects

Id: RMo-z8hO2HM

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 02 2018