 Welcome back to an FNA for new animators. And today I want to talk about audio, audio in terms of your animation connection with the audio. What does that mean? So when you choose your audio, you have to make sure that the characters in your scene match that audio in terms of the intonation, the energy, the age, the noises in the background is everything that the audio has. It needs to be a connection between what you're hearing and what you're seeing. And it's something that I'm speaking of seeing, seeing in student work where it's not always there. And just quick before I start, I have my name's JD and I do animation lectures like these, I do animation analysis clips, I do acting analysis, do a bunch of stuff. This is the channel about an animation with kind of reviews in there and everything. You see all the thumbnails flashing by there. But that's the animation, that's the pitch for maybe subscribing. If you're like, if you wanna miss any of those uploads, that's the typical thing that you do on the channel. So like and subscribe, right? All that good stuff. But just throwing that out there quickly, let's get into the shots. And what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna dramatically recreate what a student would do with an audio piece. So first let's play the audio. Initialize sequence now. You drive. So I'm gonna dramatically recreate what a student would do. And this will be the clip. Initialize sequence now. You drive. So the audio is from Demolition Man and that section takes place in the future. So you're gonna have little beeps and bloops and you got that computer voice that doesn't quite make sense in this setting. So that to me is to really disconnect where you hear that voice but nothing's happening in the shot where that is connected. There's no computer sitting like a robot that could say something there's a bunch that it could do but there's nothing in there. At the same time, character is centered. There's nothing in the background. It's kind of simple. And when the character gets out, it's basically just I'm opening the door and I'm leaving. You have some form of mechanics of just getting out but it doesn't quite fit the audio. Why? Because the audio is of an older character. So this is your default free rig that you can get online. It's a good rig. But to me, he looks a lot younger. So there's already a disconnect in terms of what the sound is of an older person and then the rig you're using that's a younger looking rig. So the first change that I would do is to modify the character so that he looks older, right? The balding, some hair here, some glasses maybe. This is all part of the awesome rig. You can definitely change all that within the rig. But then it still is like this. Initialize sequence now. You drive. It's the same animation. Still the disconnect, at least visually it gets a bit better but I don't like that. The computer voice is at the beginning and I'm not a big fan of the pose. He doesn't feel strange. There's a strain and a certain in the voice that is not reflected in the animation or the posing. So the first thing I want to do is change the sound. I want to take the end that has a bit more of a silent piece and add that at the beginning, take out the computer voice and it kind of mixes. So at the beginning there's a bit more silence and then it goes into the grunting and the little bit of lip sync and then the character getting out of the car. So then we have this. There's sounds at the beginning. You drive. And the rest is the same. So don't feel like the audio piece is something you have to stick to 100%. It's just there as a beginning. You can tweak the auto so that you can just concentrate on the animation and make that look like the way you want it and then kind of fit the auto into that. But what I'm going to do now is change the animation into this. It's not going to be straight on. We are in the rule of thirds, the crappy thirds that I'm drawing here and adding a better overlay there. And then having the character a bit more cramped. I also rotated the car around so that there are more dynamic lines and seeing a bit more of the spine kind of moved over with the head. That would be kind of tricky when you have a character that's straight on and it's bent towards us. So you want to change it over, so you have a bit more room to show the bending of the character. Audio is the same. You drive. And the character still gets out of the car fairly fast, but at least this is a bit better. He has to put the head down. It feels a bit more like, yeah, this is a bit more of a pain. At the same time, it's still all gray and maybe you could switch this to like this. Usually left to right is how we approach a general shot. The hero goes left to right, at least in the country that I'm in, that's kind of the storytelling now. And if the character goes somewhere left to right, maybe at the end of the journey, he comes back right to left or an enemy is looking right to left while the hero is looking left to right, that type of stuff. So you can look at this and find where you want. So now what I want to do is actually tweak this a step further. So I like that I changed the audio. I like that I changed the composition a little bit with the car and what the character is doing. But at the same time, he is addressing someone else. Says you drive. Okay, so where's the other character? So I'm going to add a second character, add a bit of a background stuff, some lights, nothing crazy, but enough to make it more look like a shot and not an exercise. Something where I can go, if I tweak this enough, hopefully with more ideas, then it can be a damn real piece. So this is still rough blocking. Everything here is just a rough blocking path to sell out all the ideas and the story points and the acting choices. And this is what I have now. So this is your other character that this character is talking to. I really want to push that idea of the character not being comfortable. So it's really small. I want to use this as kind of a comedic point of just seeing the eyes here. And even if you start the shot and you go left or right and you start here, the character is looking here. You even have lines that go towards the character to some degree, even tweak this a little bit and even have like little lines here of that. So whatever you can do to focus on that. And at the same time, I also put a spotlight around here so that he is just a bit brighter. He's just a bit darker. Eyes are a bit more pronounced. Hopefully everything will lead towards that composition. Same audio, but this is what I have as a linear spline rough blocking pass. You drive. There you go. So you can see that some sections are kind of spliny out. Then it gets a bit rougher in terms of the spacing and some of the moves. But to me, it tells a story. The character is impatient. And even if you would look here, that movement is going to draw the answers I hear. Again, just in case, but it's going to be less than before. So even in my blocking pass, I want contrast. So that's going to change. And then you're going to have a blink. The eye is going to go over here so that we're ready for this move. This is a very exaggerated foot up. That's where all the strain comes in. And when it gets out of here, you can hear how there's exhale. And that's why I have the character slow down. After this, this is a lot of exertion. There's a lot of, here's all the character. I say, ah, to turn around. This is the moment of inhale, exhale. All right, that's enough for me. Let's get out of here. And on top of that, a little bit of weight shift in the car. There's some turning in the wheel just to show that there is weight on this. I'm turning here and even here, even though the hand is somewhat off screen, you can see it turns the wheel. And here a little bit, it's indicated that he's still holding the wheel a little bit. You have that here and that's it. This character is basically just looking. There's definitely more you could do with this character. And I would probably tweak some things here in terms of how long does he hold it? Do I want to make him a bit bigger? I kind of like that it's just the eyes. But maybe that moment with the leg could be cleaner. There's a bunch of things you can definitely still tweak. But as a whole, it feels to me more connected. There's a bit more comedy in there where you have the contrast in terms of the height between the characters. There is more physical involvement of him going up, bringing up the leg. All of this he has to hold on to this. This is a labor intensive move. And to me, it fits the audio more. And again, you have to listen to inhale and exhale in whatever audio you have so that you do build those pauses in there. But even animation wise, you can have a big turn and then pause and then go. So even then you have a bit more of a contrasty move in terms of there's written to it. It's not just always moving. There's an up and a hole and a down. You want to think in terms of rhythm and beats and phrasing and pose and all that good stuff. Now this is just linear spline rough blocking. You can take all of these and then since I talked about step mode before, you can take these and bake them on twos and put that into steps, which then looks like this. You drive. So even with this, you still get all the ideas. I kept the lids in spline, but everything else, you can see here as it steps through, it still tells a story. You can probably also stay on threes, but I kept this on twos. It's an easy conversion from the linear spline to steps, but it has all the information in terms of the fingers, the body, the eyes, the looks, the weight. The only other thing that kept in spline was the car. So the car movement is splined, the rest is stepped out of my mixing these two and that's it. So if you compare all five versions, you can see how far this has come. The first one is just the basic idea without any tweaks. Then you have the version without the audio. Now that I'm talking, you can't really hear the audio. And then you have a slight tweakage in terms of what the character looks like. And then you have a tweak in the posing so that it fits a bit more what the action is. And at the end, I'll make the biggest tweak in terms of the lights, adding a second character, pushing the poses, pushing the idea and the contrast and really making sure that the animation is matching the audio. You drive. Now the audio is short. I tried to keep it short and that's always the big reminder to students. Keep it short so you can make past tweaks in just, you know, this is to me more like a mechanics, comedy approach to the shot, not huge in terms of lip sync because even the mouth is covered most of the time there. Now this is slightly unrealistic because the students would have picked a lot longer auto clip. But hopefully this is a good example of you can pick something short and a bunch of stuff in there to make it interesting and hopefully funny so that you're not saddled with a shot that's 20 seconds long, potentially too boring in terms of the composition, what the characters are doing and given a topic where there's a disconnect between the audio and the characters. Hopefully it all makes sense. If any questions, obviously comments open, let me know. But make sure that if you have an audio piece where someone sounds old, that you pick an old character or someone sounds young, you pick a young character. If there's background stuff that you maybe add something in the background that could help you. When I switched the ends to the beginning, there was a tapping sound. That was from the movie where someone gets out and touches something. So I thought since I'm hearing this tapping, I might use the fingers so that it connects there. And to me generally, it's also more fun to see how the characters are alive with all the inhales and the grunts and maybe some like rubbing sounds where you can do something. That to me is just all part of the fun of animating to audio. Now, speaking of fun, if you feel like this was fun and you wanna have fun with me helping you with your awesome shots, making them even more awesome, that's right, is the segue to my workshops. I have workshops you can sign up at any time. I can work with you one-on-one. You can plan things out. We can go through blocking, we can go through polish. Let's chat, let me know what you need. Link in the description with all the information, of course, and that is it for me. So if you're still watching, thank you for watching until the very end. I appreciate it. Maybe by now you like this, you don't wanna miss any of those lectures, then maybe you wanna subscribe. I don't know, maybe that is enough of a pitch to subscribe and stay with me in this channel and look at future uploads. I don't know, that's the ending pitch that I have. But that's it for me. Thanks again and I'll see you hopefully in my next upload.