September 11sec club crit

Last month's crit of the winner of the 11 second Club, done by Kenny Roy, a mentor who I always tried to watch all of his critiques while at AM because I learned so much from him.

whenever the face is turned from camera you really need to push the lip-sync/ mouth shapes much more so they read, also cheat the mouth over towards camera, so it's clearer.

On Horton they had a control to grab the mouth and swing it out from under the trunk so that it was easier to read. Bluesky put cheating tools into the hands of the animators.

Dipthongs, vowels that have two actual vowel sounds, making two mouth shapes. Like fire actually if slowed down sounds like FaaaIIIIre. So often you want to stick on the first part of the dipthong because that sound is stronger and visually will more clearly communicates the word being made. Lean towards big open shapes (if possible) to telegraph the words.

Keys on jaw should not always line up perfectly with keys on mouth. For example, in the words "soccer" the "er" sound actually occurs during the close of the jaw, not a
/
second opening of the jaw. So go through your dialogue, with your hand on your chin, focusing on simplifying and amping up your jaw movement (so making it simpler, but also bigger so that it's clearer.)

R shapes Kenny Roy usually mixes an oo shape with a sneer.

Kenny likes to do an entire jaw pass before touching the mouth shapes. Finds it helps the lip synch a lot to just have the jaw nailed.

Kenny talks again about holding consonants at the end of words, that when the air ends we are still holding the mouth shape for a little while.

Overlap in the face, in the brows for example. Really makes the face feel fleshy and realistic and organic, keeping you out of the uncanny valley. The 12 principles (squash and stretch, antic, overlap) all apply to the face.) Kenny is complimenting Tim's overlap on the brows, which is reactive of the head shaking.

Kenny goes over again 2ndary action again. His example this time is if he's talking while twirling a pen he has enough cpu power to do both, but if he hears something that makes him angry and he suddenly stops his 2ndary because it takes all his cpu power to focus on the new information, so it has a big impact.

Kenny warns that rigs tempt you to rotate the upper spine a bit too much, because biomechanically our upper spines don't move to much because the ribcage holds it pretty stiff, so spread rotation out along the whole spine.

Tennis match, of where the audience's attention is, imagine it's a single ball bounced around the scene, from character to character.

Confident acting is a good thing, even if the director doesn't agree, it's easier to change then to deal with a wishy washy performance and have to try and push it to a strong performance.