Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505195
22 KEYFRAME HEY, BIG MOUTH Mouth movements on speaking animals can present their own difficulties. Cheryl Johnson says that for Baby Shark's Big Show! they have a system in place for building mouth charts for most characters to accommodate all the phonemes they need to say. Where possible, they will try to stick existing mouth charts on new characters if it works with their design, but whenever they add a character that has a unique mouth shape, they have to build a new chart that usually includes a front-facing view, a three-quarter front, and a side view. It's a lot of tedious work, she says, but it's absolutely essential. With human characters, she explains, you can build a theme that you can reuse across different faces, but that's not pos- sible with animals ranging from dolphins to crabs because their faces are all so different. In the show they've had to make the mouths more human because it's eas- ier and works better with their character designs to make them more appealing. Frog and Toad's mouths were also prob- lematic, according to Sarah Johnson. "Early on, we were trying to avoid them looking SIZE MATTERS SIZE MATTERS Animals come in a vast range of sizes, creating unique complications when figuring out how they should interact. Rob Hoegee points out that in Frog and Toad, the sense of scale was hugely important. The show has charac- ters as big as a raccoon and as small as a ladybug, and when seen next to each other they needed to be in proper scale. For example, when Frog and Toad are talking to Raccoon, Racoon towers over them. They also wanted to show a natural scale in terms of animals living in a human world. So when Frog and Toad are walking down a path, he explains, they really are at frog and toad level, and what looks like a tree might just be a flower. While seeing scale as a problem to be solved, Crystal Stromer also finds it fun to play with. On Baby Shark's Big Show!, she says they often end up having to adapt certain props and have different scales of props. A cup for a fish might be a different size than the one for a whale. "Either we'll scale it up, so it's appropriate to the size of that character, or depending on the gag, sometimes we'll leave it very small or very large, just for a funny visual contrast," she says. But it can be tough to figure out scale when two characters are vastly different in size and interacting with the same prop. In those situations, they try to split the difference. The Monkey King complicates matters of scale because there are three versions of Monkey: baby, adult, and giant. Adult Monkey is in the same size range as humans. But there are times, like in a climactic fight scene with the Dragon King, when they both become giants. Conveying weight and force in the actions of giant characters is a particular challenge. "You have to spend the time getting the movement started and you have to spend the time finishing the move," Rune Bennicke says, explaining how the Head of Character Animation addressed this issue. "His approach to it was that you spent a few shots setting up the scale and maybe exaggerating the weight of the giant characters. Once the audience has accepted the size and the scale, then you don't worry as much about it—you can go into something that feels a bit more real." 22 KEYFRAME above: Numerous mouth charts were developed for the variety of characters in Baby Shark. Peking opera provided inspiration for the theatrical look of The Monkey King. F E AT U R E