Animating Dialogue

Adam Sale

Compilation paper

When you are ready to begin animating dialogue, there are a number of issues that you must address before plowing blindly forward. The first thing you need to be aware of is; What does the character do while talking? If you refer back to the notes on expression, you must take care not to contradict your dialogue with body actions or vice versa. The biggest issue that you will initially face, is how to find a way to accent the dialogue, or match the speech accents that are already present in the delivery of that characters lines. The easiest way to do this is by making marks on your exposure sheets marking sections of dialogue where different keyposes or expressions can be used. Of course, this can only be done by listening to your audio track over and over. Monotonous and boring…. Certainly, but essential if you are to get your animation to an acceptable level.

By repetitively listening to your track, you can begin to eradicate meaningless, unrelated movement during dialogue that destroys the personality that may have been carefully built up in earlier scenes.

Too much movement, however related it may be, makes it nearly impossible to see the expressions.

Generally, the standard practice involves the animator phrasing the action in terms of the dialogue. You should thumbnail and then animate a different body attitude on each phrase with the appropriate gestures.

A slight pause at the end of each phrase gives the character a chance to display a new expression while the body is quiet. The next phrase then, would yield a new attitude and gesture with a variation of the expression. This simplifies the problem of dialogue, by eliminating extraneous moves that keep a character moving without meaning. This focuses the animator on the relation of the attitude, gesture and expression, and should cause the animator to ask questions regarding staging, and shot selection necessary to improve the scene.