March 2025 – Debotriya's Journal

Among all the animation exercises I wanted to try and experiment with at least one of them and it ended up being the Lip Sync exercise. Looking at last year’s compilation, I was struck by how each entry had a different style and treatment, and that motivated me to try and make this in Blender with grease pencil.

Though I had a few troubles with figuring out the method to achieve what I was going for, the primary hurdle seemed to be deciding what I wanted to do with the prompt in the first place. I admit I was trying really hard for it to be funny and spent a lot of time overthinking my line and my storyboard over and over again. For the prompt, ‘lost in translation’ I was talking about how my perceived personality changes when I switch languages, and had a moment when the character literally flips a switch and we see them change. It was all in English, but I received feedback that it would make more sense to actually change languages. My concern, I suppose, was that Bangla is structured very different from English and the line wouldn’t make any sense, and the joke might very literally be lost in translation.

Ideating with the visualisation of the dialogue

Eventually the deadline meant I had to get out of my own head and just make it, tweak it later.

I had hit a similar bump with the Silent Movie acting exercise where I felt like I had spent too much time just overthinking what my idea was, being generally very indecisive and unsatisfied with whatever I could come up with. In one our lectures where Sue Tong was here, she mentioned being stressed about whether an idea is good enough and the best thing to do in the scenario is to just take a call, even if ends up being the wrong call eventually. Things can be fixed later, and it would be far more productive to have something than nothing at all.

Once I started, I sketched out a simple character who obviously looks one way, making it funny when she switched behaviour. I realised I am far more comfortable in Maya than Blender (the shortcuts and formatting difference really gets frustrating), so now I had to find a way to model and rig a character in Maya but then bring it into Blender to use Blender’s grease pencil feature. After a failed attempt and consulting Pat Robinson, I realised Maya and Blender have different logics for constraints, and so rigs are not easily transferable. So I have to animate the body language for the character in Maya, bake the animation to the joints and then carry it into Blender just for the texturing, grease pencil and render part.

Adding expressions and mouth shapes in Blender grease pencil

While this method meant I got to try out a style I had wanted to try for a long time but did not have someone to troubleshoot with, it did mean I had lesser time left for the expressions and lip sync part of the exercise. I made a chart and drew out mouth shapes for the whole line word by word in my notebook, which made my life much easier.

There are still things to tweak and things I would like to do differently when I make something like this again, but I’m still glad I simply went ahead and made it, failed and tried again instead of being paralysed.

For a few days in this term, we got a sneak peak into the process of helping someone else realise their vision of their film. Magdalena and I were paired with Ashwitha de Mel to work on her film Rotten Work. The film tells the story of a relationship, how it began sweet, but slowly started to decay from the inside, with an unnerving yet very tangible parallel of teeth rotting.

We sat with Ashwitha and divided our roles, I was tasked with the character sheet and exploring the main character’s poses from her initial sketches and the animatic, while Magdalena looked at the environment and layouts.

Unfortunately, soon after we started, I sustained a hand injury and my working timeline got compromised. However, Ashwitha was very accommodating and we co-ordinated online to see how much I could get done.

Ashwitha’s style and drawing skills were much different from my own, and tasked with adapting her character into different poses and angles, I had to spend a day of practice simply to study the character references and making rough sketches till I got a hang of the base shapes and the proportions looking similar. I used a rough turnaround (even though the final treatment is not locked in yet) just as a guide for myself.

Rough sketches trying to get a hang of the character’s proportions

I had only done character development for my own characters before, and my next challenge was to look at the animatic and try to gauge what kind of body language and expressions the protagonist girl was going to have. Picking off of the mood of the film, the drawings in the animatic and the reference images from the mood board, the main character seemed to have a gentle and graceful manner and in the story, she initially appears very at ease and domestic around her partner, though slowly we start to see frustration, anger and despair from her as well. However even her frustration needed to feel like the same gentle person losing patience, without being uncharacteristically loud or expressive.

I searched for reference images that would match the situations, sometimes going out of the animatic to see if there were more poses or expression that could show off her nature. I kept checking in and sharing my progress with Ashwitha and she seemed to really like the way the poses were going.

I was very surprised and glad to find I had managed to be on the same page as her, and I would credit that to the animatic and how well it captured the mood of the film, peaceful and uncomfortable at the same time. Ashwitha’s way of organising information on what she envisioned, yet giving us room to try out our interpretations felt very effective. It was a new challenge working on someone’s project while they are also still figuring out the details, but I would guess having someone else’s interpretations of your story would also help seeing how the film might be perceived eventually. This role was a good way to start seeing how our own workshop in character design helped me see characters in shape language, as well as how life drawing had prepared me to read gestures and body language more clearly. I would say, my drawing skills still felt limited, and I need much more practice to make rough sketches more solid and coherent.

Month: March 2025

Adventures in Lip Syncing

Work Experience in Character Posing