The mouth is one of the most expressive areas of the face. We first look to the eyes to convey attitude in the face but the mouth should complement the eyes and work with the rest of the pose. If you just look at the nightly news, no two people really speak the same. Mouth shapes should be unique to the character you are working on. You are striving for many different things in the mouth

Squash and Stretch: Its important to have the shapes squash and stretch in a natural way. I’m not talking about Bluth type squash and stretch. In cg, that level does not work as well. You want to feel it, not see it. You also need to know how to incorporate different parts of the face to make it look fleshy.

Arcs: Making sure the proper arcs are in place is so important. Pay close attention to the corners of the mouth when polishing dialogue. You really want those corners to move in and out in a natural way.  Chattery mouth shapres are not fun to look at.

Design : Obviously designing good shapes is hard. You are looking for asymmetry, simple to complex shapes, straights to curves… You don’t want the mouth looking like a football. Yes, some mouth shapes may look that way, but the key is to have read-ability and appeal. Look at real life… Man people have very interesting shapes in the mouth. It adds so much character.

Simplicity: One of the most common student mistkes is to put too many mouth shapes into dialogue. If you just look at the way your mouth articulates shapes, you will see alot of shapes are combined.

Teeth: Know when to favor upper or lower teeth. Obviously they play a huge part in the design and acting of the character. Tom Wilkonson talks more with is bottom teeth showing, someone like Joe Pesci talks with his top teeth and Tom Crusie seems to have both teeth talking.

Again, all this comes from observation and just looking at great examples. Hope this helps a little.

Andrew

I wanted to post an addendum to the Ricky Nierva Spline Cast. Ricky was talking about some inspirational art that he got from Bill Pressing. The artist is Ludwig Hohlwein. German poster artist, died in 1949. Here are some links:

http://giam.typepad.com/100_years_of_illustration/ludwig_hohlwein_18741949/

http://www.yaneff.com/html/artists/hohlwein.html

Some other cool sites that have been floating around:

http://penciltestdepot.blogspot.com/

Here is a great site with some free downloads on animation education. Jason is a great animator at Dreamworks who really does a great job putting together these webinars… Click on the Ramp ups. I wish I had this when I was going to school. I could have saved alot of money.

http://www.jrawebinar.com/body.htm

Not that Spline Doctors is a place to pimp anything but animation education, I did wat to say that Presto is available on Itunes. Here is a link. Please address any questions about this short in the comments section and myself or Travis or Mark will try to answer them.

viewMovie

Stay tuned for the Doug Sweetland Spline Cast…

Andrew

Hey, here is link to some pretty neat tutorials, put together by Cameron Fielding. They are worth a look and thanks to Cameron for taking the time to put them together.

Flip

–stephen

http://www.animationmentor.com/index.cfm

Here they are:

Pencil – A free open source program

Mirage – Alot like deluxe paint 4 for the Amiga only better! (TV Paint is the european counter-part)

Flipbook – widely used 2d program. Very simple and robust

Feel free to submit any other 2d animation programs that you know of.

-Andrew

here is the link!

–Dr. Stephen G.

This Year I had the privilege of being a guest artist for the 5th time. Rick Vertolli has been the guiding light of the computer graphics program at CSU summer arts. The range of Guest Artists is really amazing. We had Mike Wellins, who is an independent film maker and director. He works up at Leica. Rusty Mills, who has been a Producer/Director for many projects including Pinky and the Brain and animaniacs. Brian Boyd, a TD from Pixar was their to talk about all aspects of color, lighting and also rigging. Chuck Harvey, who trained under Milt Kahl was also one of the guest artists. Chuck, having worked with the greats, had so much inspiring artwork to show. His collection of animation art blew everyone away. The subject of this years workshop was character development. The students got to take acting classes from a teacher from Second City and then develop that character using a CG rig. Things like Walk cycles, Pose Tests and Acting scenes are some of the work being done. The students were also lucky enough to get a tour of Pixar, which usually is impossible to do for a group this size.

Another great thing about summer arts is the fact that alot of other workshops are going on around the campus. There is an energy that really feels great. Students are working till 2 am. Its an intense experience. One thing that should be noted is that 80% of students receive some sort of scholarship. When you think about how expensive animation education can be, this is why Summer Arts is the best kept secret in animation education. The culmination of the work will be on Friday, the 27th of July 2007

-Andrew

http://renderman.pixar.com/annecy.html