Day One - Hello!

Welcome to lip synch and facial animation. 

I'm going to rely on this blog pretty heavily as a way of providing content, lecture information, assignments, and also as a way for you to solicit feedback on your work from both myself and other students.

Since it's the first day, it will be a bit less structured than it will going forwards, but it's a good time to get a sense of where everyone is, go over expectations and talk about our goals in this class.

Things we'll go over today:

• You - your background, any work you'd like to show.
• This blog - you all will be blog authors and can add content. 
• timed posing demo - (will go over in a bit)
• tools, some basic tools for maya (I'll be adding a dropbox link)
• Mini lectures
• rough workflow for working with dialogue
• mouth on a layer
• writing down beats
• visemes, phonemes, and other memes 
• Character research and acting choices.
• stepped v. spline. 

Timed posing demo.

• we'll do a couple of these - you'll have 5 min or each of these to draw or pose an animated sequence of 3 poses showing a change of emotion.

From the outline:

Module 1   

Topic: Introductions

Notes: Class introductions, grading policies and assignment parameters. Sign up for the blog.

Lecture/Demo: 
Researching your subject. 
Subtext: what a character says and what they mean. 
Class participation: “Cookie Points” 
Skills review and meet Morphy. 
Working quickly: Timed posing demo. Show sources for sound
.

Activity: Students try timed posing. Pick 3-5 sec sound clip for assignment one, pick 11-20 sec sound clip for assignment two.

Assignment: Lip Sync One. (LS1) Modules 1-4. This is a relatively simple assignment, a quick 3-5 sec lip sync piece with one character. The purpose of the assignment is to give you a chance to get warmed up with your rig of choice, and to let me get an assessment of your current skill level. We're actually doing this backwards from normal animation workflow, attacking the lip sync first! Featured principles: Posing, Timing, and Staging. 3-5 sec. long (72-120 fr) Hand in will be due at the start of module 4. Have rough visemes ready to show next class. 

Watch demo video on vimeo.com/dlatour “Rough Lip sync”