- [Instructor] Here's a really fun dialogue action
that emerged from some sketches that I created
for my previous course on how to draw animated characters.
It's got a lot of squash and stretch
as well as being really interesting to look at.
So initially as part of that drawing course,
I wanted to show how to illustrate older characters,
those with some weight and wrinkles and loose skin,
and so I did this quick character sketch
and then I just designed these three shapes in profile,
and as I drew them I even had a mental image
of granny coming up to her poor little grandkid
going, come here, give granny a kiss
(puckers lips) like that, I mean, actually imagine that
'cause you really want to get inside the head
of these characters, so that was a really nice
fun looking drawing with a lot of vitality to it
even though she's very very old, a lot of personality there.
So how would you go about creating
a dialogue scene with that?
So here's the final sequence.
I'm naming the mouths with the traditional
TV naming convention of A through F is extremely useful.
I've said this in previous courses, I'll say it again,
they do not correspond to phonetic sounds
so that the A mouth is the closed mouth
for M, B, and P sound shapes.
The wide open mouth would be good for vowel sounds,
the B mouth for E sounds, and this of course for ooh sounds.
So I'm gonna show you the sequence in which
I created these various shapes, so the first one
to start from is the closed mouth.
Second was the open or D mouth.
On the right side I've overlayed them in blue and green,
so we have the A mouth in green
and the open D mouth in blue.
And this allows you to see the extent of change
or motion between them, so if you want to try
to follow along with your own elderly character
or a variation of this, that'll give you an idea
of the amount of travel you're going to have to induce
in the character's mouth shape to match this.
Notice also, it might be hard to see,
but there's a tiny little pull-down of the nose,
and even there on the lower eyelid, it's extremely small,
but it's just enough to stop it from reading like it's held.
Next, and working again over the A mouth for reference,
I created the F mouth which will be the ooh sound,
and again, on the right side you can see them
overlayed for comparison in green and blue.
Notice that the slight motion on the lower eyelid
and the nose that follow the primary motion of the mouth,
so the mouth is moving forward and pulling
a lot of the rest of the shapes of the face with it.
I also like to draw your attention to the increasing volume
in the cheek between the A and the F shapes.
Normally we recommend that you don't increase or decrease
volume in a shape, but of course the cheeks can inflate
and deflate with air, so it's one body part
that can violate this rule on occasion,
and also here because she's so saggy on the face,
she's able to push that flesh forward
and just basically for that one brief moment
achieve a little increase in volume.
And the most subtle of our four main shapes
is the B mouth which creates the E sound.
Many people just make the B mouth a straight in-between
between the A and the D, but I always like to push it back.
So if you look at my green A mouth here,
look at how far back I've pulled the corner of the B
to get that circular chewing action going,
and it's also got the virtue of it's pulled the cheek
mask back, if I really wanted to push this,
I could pull the jewelry back a little bit and even to here.
I have to draw the line somewhere with this, though,
but even that little crease might be hard to see,
but there's a little crease there
on the corner that's been pinched.
So those are our four main shapes.
I call them the four, there's six here, why?
Well see, basically it's an in-between,
it's a glorified in-between for some degree
of smoothness in here, and the E is also pretty much
an in-between, that's a tricky one, but it's certainly
just transitioning from the D to the F.
So these then become your six shapes,
in order to say the word hello,
you'd start with B, C, D, C, E, F.
And you get the idea, so that will be the sequence
of key frames that you would assign to the timeline.
So here is the scene animated with in-betweens.
Notice again the very subtle motion that we're seeing
here on the lower eyelid, the track.
We understand by this and by the jawline
following along and even the two creases,
that it tapers off around here, but this creates
the impression that we're not looking at something
that's like a layer crudely bolted on,
the whole mass of the face is moving
so it's one consistent unified object.
And finally, one last look now in tone.
Looks really nice, so as I've said in all my movies
about dialogue, strive to make the action nice and chewy,
create good strong shapes, and those four primary keys,
and if you're going for a realistic or a richer style
of motion, be sure to have some of the dialogue
affect the surrounding areas of the face
such as the nose or the lower eyelid, and of course
this nice circular motion as well is just gravy.