Dialogue

It's hard to believe we're already at the final project of the semester! The goal of this project was to animate a short, 5-10 second clip of a character speaking and acting to dialogue. The dialogue I ended up choosing for this assignment was a snippet of conversation from the game Kid Icarus: Uprising, between the flightless angel Pit and the goddess Palutena that he serves. It's a personal favorite game of mine and a large part of that is because of the clever writing and quippy characters, so I knew I wanted to pull something from this game. The original conversation was about 20 seconds long, but I ended up cutting to just the first 5 seconds.

The character designs in Kid Icarus: Uprising are extremely detailed, with many intricate elements. They're animation unfriendly, to put it mildly, and I did a bit of experimenting on how to simplify their designs to the most basic elements before the assignment formally started. After that point, I did some rough boarding to get the general poses for the actions down. In this stage, I covered both Pit and Palutena, but I knew that animating two different characters would be very time-consuming. In the context of the conversation source (and most of the game itself), Palutena speaks to Pit via telepathy and is usually not physically present. As such, given this fact and her very limited speaking role in the clip compared to Pit, I was fully prepared to cut her from the project if the workload panned out. Miraculously, I ended up being able to include her in the final project within just one day, though I did have to cut a lot of movement on her part to make it work.

Surprisingly, animating the spoken dialogue was one of the smoothest parts of the project. I had taken footage of myself lipsyncing and acting to the dialogue and studied it extensively, so I was able to get to a point where the mouth movement synced up with the dialogue pretty quickly. In that respect, I'm pretty satisfied with the project. What really ate up my time was the intricacies of Pit's body animation. Even after simplying his design, there was still a lot of moving parts to account for, and the length of this project was far longer than anything up to this point.

Admittedly, part of that workload was unnecessarily put on myself for animating the project entirely on 1s. It would have been much easier to work on 2s or 3s for the majority of the assignment, but by the time I realized this after subconsciously working on 1s for a while, I had done so much work that cutting and rearranging a ton of it would have left me feeling worse. At one point while working on this project over the weekend, I had also gotten approached by a friend who had taken the class and said that the very rough boarded poses would have worked just fine for the assignment. I'm not sure whether this still holds true or not, since most of the in-class examples were fully animated from what I remembered, but if so then it would've been another area in which I did extra.

In spite of all these difficulties, however, I'm reasonably pleased with the end result, and it's probably one of my favorite results from this semester nonetheless. As I completed more and more layers of the project, I eventually hit a point where I'd just hit play every so often to watch the project come together. Seeing all the work put in come to life is a really gratifying feeling, and I'm grateful I got the ability to practice my animation skills through this class.