First Dialogue Test

Dialogue: First Test (ever)

Introduction

This is my first test of dialogue I have ever done. I'd thought I'd start off really small to begin with.

I chose to use the dialogue from a game character from one of my favorite games for motivation as a saw a lot of potential in such a small space of time. As in, I felt I could get a lot of expression from what he was saying despite the dialogue being used was so short.

The character I speak of is 'The Sniper' from team Fortress 2.

I chose this character because of a few reasons; firstly because I like this character and thought he'd be interesting to animate. Secondly, having a long face, I believed this have me opportunities to experiment with squash and stretch in his face as he spoke. Lastly, he has some of the funnier dialogue in the game (in my opinion) and from this I thought I could combine the dialogue and facial expressions to create an interesting and amusing test.

Sketches

I started with these sketches to get an idea of the face and its structure.

I did these to see how i'd draw the face and how his face would move saying different words and sounds. Facial expressions are important to as I want to express his feelings and emotions through what he says.

I found it particularly difficult to get the eyes right, i'm most happy with the sketches at the top of the page because I believe the eyes are right and show how the character is feeling. However the bottom row I'm still not 100% happy about just because it was a difficult balance of maintaining the Sniper's personality, expressing what he was feeling at that single moment in time and making sure the eyes looked right.

From these drawings I drew the key points of what the sniper was going to say. I chose the line:

 "Ahh Piss!" from the game because it was one of the shortest, and I believed I could get a lot of expression from the line.

I am especially happy with the second point/key where his face is stretched and saying "Ahh" because I believe I managed to express that feeling of disappointment and combination of squashing the eyes and nose with the stretching of the mouth exaggerating his movement.

First Test: Keys

  This video was made to test to see if the drawings captured the right emotions and expressed the characters feeling as he said the line, which I believed it did. I particularly like how his head is extremely low once he finished saying 'piss' because of the extreme change from the previous position where his head is extremely high.

Test 2: Keys and in-between

From this test I continued by drawing the keys on individual sheets and adding an in-between for each key, to make the movement more fluid and to further test the movement of the Sniper.

I imported these images into Photoshop to create the video and sync the images to the dialogue. I had to create multiple versions as it was a challenge to time the images exactly with sounds. As in the first section where he says 'Ahh' is much longer than when he says 'Piss' so therefore the images of when his face is stretched are on for much longer than when the images are on for when he says 'Piss'.

The whole purpose of these tests were to challenge myself and to try something different. Despite the tests not going as smoothly as I hoped, I felt like I have learnt a lot and will apply what i have learned to future projects. I may continue with these tests to make it completely smooth, or I am continue with a different character saying different dialogue.