The first time I witnessed animation in action was in an animated movie. The way the character’s expression and the dialogues bring out the emotions is what made me fall in love with illustration and animation.

I looked up a few reference images online and practiced it roughly on procreate before actually animating. Steve’s notes came in handy to understand the phonetics and gave me a head start.

I felt that I will struggle a lot with this one but I wasn’t half bad at it. I did not want my character to not move while talking. It ended up moving too much but I don’t see that as an issue.

For my character, I chose a monkey, wearing lip colour, who is teaching you how to whistle. Because, why not.

For our second lip sync, we were given a studio to record our own audio. It was an amazingly fun experience. I went the “drama” route. My recording was bigger than I expected it to be. I had to cut it short and it still ended up being about 8 seconds long. This one sounds dark but it was actually supposed to be funny because I spoke about how I want to haunt my own people in my own language. However, I had to cut it out.

In all my animation exercises, I have tried to practice some element of my drawing skills. For instance, I am not too good at drawing hands and I tried to add it here to challenge myself.

I really had to redo this over and over again. I made a rough sketch and then decided on using a ink pen brush to do the cleaning up. I have always enjoyed working with sketchy brushes and this was the first time I was using such a smooth brush which isn’t something that I might do again.