I initially had quite a bit of trouble getting the audio to play properly at 12 fps, the specified frame rate for this task. It turned out that the solution was to change the working unit of time (Window-Settings/Preferences-Preferences-Settings) to 12 fps as opposed to film 24 fps, rather than just changing the playback speed in the Animation Preferences menu.
Once the audio was successfully imported, I could begin to study and examine the sound clip, in order to break it down for the dope sheet. A dope sheet is an extremely useful reference tool for animators, allowing you to note down the frame at which certain sounds and actions should occur. The visual representation of the audio shown in the timeslider (see screenshot below) gives me an idea of when something is being said. However, it shows the background noise (of which there is quite a lot) and music as well as the main speaker's dialogue, so it is not always clear when a word begins or ends. Luckily, if you move the time slider a frame at a time it will play the relevant audio for that frame, allowing me to break down the dialogue into its individual sounds, so I know what phoneme to animate at each frame.
Another problem to overcome in this task is that a significant communicator in phonemes is the position of the tongue, which Moom is unfortunately lacking. Exposure of the teeth can also be a helpful indicator as to which sound a character is making, but initially I chose to remove Moom's large buck teeth, mainly because they are extremely ugly, but also because I thought they might obscure the rest of the mouth shape. However, without the teeth I have to concede a number of the phoneme shapes blended together, so I was forced to put the teeth back in. Consequently, so that the phoneme isn't hidden by the teeth, exaggeration will be all the more important; I will need to take recognisable mouth shapes and emphasise these in order to produce a clear lip sync.
However, the 12 fps timeline means that there simply aren't enough frames to include every phoneme, so some will simply have to be left out. Luckily, the audio recording I am working with ('but they'll never take...our FREEDOM' from Braveheart) has quite a few soft syllables which makes it easier to identify the most suitable phoneme. For example, Mel Gibson doesn't really pronounce the 't' at the end of 'but' or the 'k' at the end of 'take'. It was quite hard however to convince myself that these syllables could be left out, that they didn't need to be included.
Once the audio was successfully imported, I could begin to study and examine the sound clip, in order to break it down for the dope sheet. A dope sheet is an extremely useful reference tool for animators, allowing you to note down the frame at which certain sounds and actions should occur. The visual representation of the audio shown in the timeslider (see screenshot below) gives me an idea of when something is being said. However, it shows the background noise (of which there is quite a lot) and music as well as the main speaker's dialogue, so it is not always clear when a word begins or ends. Luckily, if you move the time slider a frame at a time it will play the relevant audio for that frame, allowing me to break down the dialogue into its individual sounds, so I know what phoneme to animate at each frame.
However, the 12 fps timeline means that there simply aren't enough frames to include every phoneme, so some will simply have to be left out. Luckily, the audio recording I am working with ('but they'll never take...our FREEDOM' from Braveheart) has quite a few soft syllables which makes it easier to identify the most suitable phoneme. For example, Mel Gibson doesn't really pronounce the 't' at the end of 'but' or the 'k' at the end of 'take'. It was quite hard however to convince myself that these syllables could be left out, that they didn't need to be included.
There are also quite a few different controllers that can be animated on Moom's face to produce a range of expressions, and the mouth alone has 6 (7 if you include the jaw) controllers. Unfortunately this meant there were a few occasions throughout this task when I forgot to set a keyframe for a controller that didn't need adjusting at that particular frame (autokey only works if you change a controller's value). Consequently the automatic in-betweens had facial elements moving when I needed them to remain stationary. However, it was a good learning experience and I can be prepared for this issue when producing my 'Acting Up' animation for this module.
Despite how negative my experience of this study task may sound, and how many frustrating little issues I encountered, I actually very much enjoyed this task. I found it very rewarding to see this not very appealing character develop a personality and begin to come to life.
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