So it looks like the animated faces thing is proving popular. That’s a bit of a shame because I feel like I have to carry on doing it and it means I now have to animate everything three times – first doing the actual stop motion with blank heads, then going through frame-by-frame putting a static face in exactly the right position on screen for each character, then again, frame-by-frame, picking the right mouth shapes for everyone.
The last couple of films were really just experiments to see what I could do with the technology. Quite a lot, it turns out. I’m learning as I go too – I managed to get away with only animating three mouths for the crowd of thiry five minifigs in Changes (for 6 Music) just by thinking on my feet and organising everything sensibly in After Effects. Then I ruined it all by putting a reflective table in the boardroom scene and ended up having to spend a day masking, blurring and scaling the powerpoint slideshow so it looked right.
All I need to do now is get better at drawing so that the mouth shapes I make all look like they belong to the same person. It takes a lot of trial and error just to do the simple things I’ve done so far. One day, I hope to have a library of sad faces, happy faces, frightened faces, angry faces, and so on.
It’s very hard to make faces, but it looks awesome. Wish you luck with other animations.
Eddy from Latvia.