Talking wolf's head

Artwork Finished works
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Hey everyone!

I finally finished my talking wolf’s head animation that I was torturing for years!
It was meant to be a practice to teach me the animation basics.
Here’s the last test: https://youtu.be/y9HztTYflRE
WARNING: Contains a Russian guy (me) trying to speak English - might be a bit cringy.

You can see the progress on it and all my previous sufferings here: Wolf's head (test animation)

Overall impression:
Holy cow, lip syncing is HARD. Even though the animation is now finished and in the process of making it I gained some basic knowledge about lip syncing and working with voice, there’s still a lot to improve. I kinda understand now all those anime guys who often limit the lip movement to, like, 3 or 4 mouth positions.

If you wonder, in English language there’re about 20 different mouth shapes for different sounds and I implemented them all. Not sure why, I could probably re-use a lot for similar sounds but I decided not to.

So, what do you guys think? I would really like to have some opinions here about my work. It took me a lot of time to make and I personally have some biased views about it.

P.S. I feel like I finally have a basic set of skills to try my hand on some simple cartoons.

5 Likes
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Hi, nice work on the wolf. Good job on the lip sync also. It’s good to have enough mouth shapes on a character. Same goes for hand gestures and other stuff that has to be swapped out during animation. Esp if you are planning to reuse the character then you can better flesh it out as much as possible. That way you only have to bother with the animation when you start to animate and you won’t have any need to add more drawings. Looking forward to your new stuff!
Greetz!

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Thanks! Yeah, I plan to re-use this character in the future for my cartoon about pack of wolves. But it’s for a far away future, so I will probably redone it several times to that moment and most definitely do some optimizations.

Next one will be a short cartoon (no dialogues though).
It should show if I actually learned something…