Giving Bugsy a Voice

For our second project in Character Animation 2, we had to pick from a set of sound clips and animate the Bugsy rig around that. We were encouraged to pick a clip we hadn't heard before so we pick our own acting choices, not the actors. A big part of this project was developing the story of the character, what he or she was doing before the dialogue. This helps push the emotion and believability. This was the sound clip I chose:

Put that had on me again, you wont get it back.

Deep voiced and aggressive, I imagined it coming from a mob boss that just had one of his workers disrespect him. This also made me think of the line "It's not a threat, it's a promise." All of these thoughts influenced my acting choices, like putting the character's power center in his chest, which can be seen in his step, this power center is often used to show dominance or confidence. Just like the last project, I developed a backstory that gave reason to all my choices.

As a child he was not in a wealthy family, in fact they were quite poor. They couldn’t afford all of the luxury that others could. After his parents passed away he was determined to be more successful and well off, in honor of them. For a very long time, conventional methods of work didn’t work out, so he got into the underground industries like drug cartels and similar businesses. With his determination and attitude he made it to the top in a few years and now owns multiple cartels. Being raised by honest parents he still holds values like respect and motivation very highly. But throughout all his years of money, power, and respect, he would be willing to trade it all to be with his parents again. Though this side of him rarely shows hue to his tough as nails exterior.

I'd say this backstory gives the character enough motivation to act the way he does. I also drew out some pre-pro in the form of key poses, storyboards, and action breakdowns. The final changed a lot from the pre-pro, but that doesn't mean there wan't any helpful information in here.

For this first pass I animated this motion where Bugsy brushes the dust off his shoulders, reacting in disgust to being touched. The more I looked at it, it just didn't look right, like something my character would do.

A very helpful critique from an instructor pointed me in the direction of old film noire as reference, that genre was filled with the soft spoken badasses I was looking for. This new information kind of forced me to rework my idea and I ended up starting from scratch, and I'm glad I did because I believe this gave me a lot more direction and helped sell the story better.

Obviously the changes here are completely different from what I had before, and to get back on schedule I had to put in some extra effort this week. You finally get to hear the sound clip but there's no lip sync. This is because it is very important to get a good base of the motion down first before messing with the mouth. Even without the mouth, good body motions can still sell the lines. But perfect lip sync and bad body animation can destroy a project.

From the second pass to the third I added in the secondary and overlapping action of the tail and antennae. I also made a few tweaks here and there to the animation, making some motions a bit more prominent.

For the final turn in, I took one more critique and fixed some details. In the beginning I raised Bugsy up a little so his right leg isn't bent as much, this way that leg looks like it is supporting the rest of the body more. That didn't take long at all thanks to the graph editor. All I needed to do was grab the right arm and COG and raise the translate Y on al the poses. This is also where I finally added the lip sync and some more emotion in the eyes. As you can see I also added the cigarette here. I was having issues parenting that geometry to any of the curves on the rig. Because the cigarette had to be in a specific part of the finger there was no curve for that so it would just float next to the hand if I used the curve. The phone in my previous pantomime project was a bit easier because the fingers were not moving as drastically. Ultimately I just ended up hand keying the cigarette and I think it turned out really nice. It didn't take that long either because I only had to worry about the first few seconds. This is what  the final looked like.

After turning in the project I was really curious to see where this sound clip came from, some of you may have recognized it but it was new to me. It's actually from the 2010 movie The Book of Eli. I've never seen it, but just hearing the moment where this clip came from was really surreal. After two weeks of hearing it over and over and over again, it was nice to see someone else's take on it. Here's a link to the scene where the clip came from, just know it's a pretty violent clip so only click if you are ok with that.

This project concludes my month of Character Animation 2. I've learned so many valuable tools and techniques that are sure to come in handy in the future. I've also learned a bit more about developing effective pre-pro and finding good reference. Let me know what you think.