Kind of a rough animation, but the line from the movie just cracks me up, how Christopher LLoyd delivers it.
From Back To The Future II
"I foresee two possibilities. One. Coming face to face with herself thirty years olderr would put her into shock and she’d simply pass out. Or two. The encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reactio n that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuom and destroy the entire universe ! … Granted that’s a worse case scenario
I know the lip sync is way off and that the animation could be greatly improved (jerky , not enough weight … ???) …(especially near “paradox”).
I like the contrast between the middle and ending though … makes me chuckle
Mike, that is pretty damn funny. Other than the lip sync stuff you mentioned, it looks like he is trying to yank something with his head the way he keeps pulling with his whole body to his right. You have already mentioned the jerky movements, so I won’t repeat, and when he says two possibilities and is only holding up one finger. If he was pointing or something it would look ok, but it looks like he is counting.
Really, I think the major thing that draws my eye is how everything sort’ve pulls to the left and back of the set when nothing is there. You kinda come away from that for a brief moment at 13 seconds, but I don’t know if it’s enough. Another thing is how much he changes height without bending, it looks like the camera is moving. He can change height as he moves, but the way it happens now looks like the camera is moving a bit too much.
On another note, the lipsync is close, there isn’t too much more needed for it. The weight I think looks fine, just some of the motion is jerky and should be smoothed out. He should probably look more and swing his head more to his left when he swings around to his left and that should take care of the body yanking I’m seeing. I think the speech is very back and forth, but the motion is overall in one direction right now.
Let me know what you think, I’m not that good myself, so I won’t profess to be an expert, and I may be way off base, that’s just how I envision it.
It’s been a long time since I actually saw the movie so I don’t even remember what Christoper Lloyd was doing in that scene. I just listened to it and imagined what the character might be doing.
At the beginning I actually had him scratching / holding his chin, and that’s what I really wanted, but somehow I messed it up … I’ll go back and fix that. … Then going to the pointin finger on “1” I tried to animate a “flick of the hand” for the 1, but it’s too fast right now … another thing to work on
I also worked on trying to time a good “hand throw” on universe and I like his “subdued” finish. The middle crazy part looks rough, mainly because I had no clear idea of what he should be doing other than “moving excitedly” … and so it shows that at the moment
I’m a bit surpised how “off” the lipsync is, as I entered markers on the timeline and entered all the words, trying to catch the major phoenemes.
I think I might be auditiioning a few other “actors” for this part (Ludwig, AJ, Otto, Emo, Proog)
The markers are good I think, but they end up being a lot of extra work unless you plan on spending quite a bit of time on the sync and facial expressions.
I don’t think the lip sync looks that far off. One thing that I find when I scrub for lip sync is I end up having to go back 2 or 3 frames to before the word begins to key the starting position of the mouth, otherwise the character opens up too early like a slackjawed yokel and everything looks kinda off. It seems counter-intuitive at first, you scrub all the way to the sound you want to key, then have to go back a few frames first to make sure the movement doesn’t start too early. Another thing that I’ve read from a few people is to use two frames to do consonants, especially b and p, since 1/24th of a second is too fast to see the frame.
I, too, haven’t seen any of the Back to the Future movies in a while, but it sounds like he is moving back and forth or side to side, like a meth addict waiting for their next hit, heheh.
The hand throw I think looks great as far as the timing and reverb, and the transformation from wild into the subdued finish is an awesome transition.
Most importantly though, it makes me laugh, and that’s all that really matters.
The arms look very IK. Especially where his body is moving a lot at around 9 seconds and the hands are not following the body at all. IK is good for leaning or pushing things, but since he’s gesturing freely here I’d say the arms here should all be pretty much completely FK.
As Bugman said, the arms do show some IK-ishness at times This might also explain the jerky elbows to as IK can tend to deliver some very sudden joint moves with minor adjustments in the end points of the chain. As Tony said, use FK for arms (unless he’s leaning something on or holding something stationary).
Some of the other jerkiness might be due to hitting target poses and stopping there, with no overshoot.
As for lip-sync… did you export the track back out of Blender (Mixdown) for syncing elsewhere or are you using an ffmpeg build - or other method? If mixing externally, you need a mixdown audio track for accurate syncing. (The sync could also maybe get broken in conversion to FLV - or is your original movie render out of sync too).
When syncing, you need to be sure to hit the very beginning of any sound, not the peak/centre of it. So you have to find a sound, for example the word “ONE”, then scrub slowly up to it until you hear the audio start to shift toward the first “W” sound. You may need to scrub back and forth to really “feel” the audio change. Put the marker right there at the absolute starting point.
If it’s just a case of the sync being out by a couple of frames all the way through then you can easily fix this by pushing the audio track backwards/forwards a couple of frames and remixing. For the most part though, it looks like you missed a lot of the consonants and these really carry most of the visual data for the viewer. For example, when he says “coming face to face” it looks like he says “oh-ee (f) ay-ee uh ay-ee” (try speaking without closing your lips together and you get the idea). Watch it with the sound off and see if you can see the lips close at all. I think there might be a couple of times where they flicker really fast (like the “f” in the first “face”) but they never actually look closed. You need to hold closed lips for a few frames minimum and you can steal frames from vowels to achieve it.
… I’m also going to experiiment with different “actors” … including Captain Blender … as I think M.C. is lacking some mouth shapes … particularly an “oh / oooh”.
