Here is how I went about creating my 3rd entry "...But You Can Never Leave!"
Step 1 : The Challenge
This was to be my 3rd entry in the contest and given the 1st “Hadrian’s Wall” was a serious dramaticscene and the 2nd “Red Dwarf’s Holly” I decided I would attemptsomething musical to test out the singing capability of AccuLips.
Step 2 : The Concept
At first my only thought was to search for a vocal onlyrecording ie an isolated vocal track of a well known recording and hope thatwhatever I found would inspire some visual ideas. I was lucky enough to discovera vocal track for the Eagles recording of “Hotel California” and instantly thescenario came to me – the Hotel California is an insane asylum.
Step 3 : The Soundtrack
The vocal track contains a mix of the lead and backingvocals, so after converting the video to MP3 I used Logic Pro X to edit thetrack to the section I wanted to use and separating it into a lead and chorustracks, making minor modifications to improve the sound quality. Creating the 2new MP3 files I now had my character audio ready for use in iclone.
Step 4 : The Characters
All the characters were created in Character Creator 3.While I didn’t set out to make them the members of the Eagles, its interestingthat there is somewhat of a resemblance of members from different eras. Thebiggest problem was the straight jackets, I couldn’t find anything I liked at areasonable price, so just mocked something up that looked reasonablyrepresentative. I also discovered that 5 CC3 characters is really pushing theenvelope in IC7 as it really struggled processing.
Step 4 : The Stage
I wanted to keep the scene very simple to put the focus firmlyon the character performance. I wanted to start with a close-up on the lips andspent some time working out how to mask everything out using the opacity sliderfor the body parts and changing the face to green so I could key out the restof the face, while retaining mouth and eyes.
Step 5 : Animation
Each of the characters used some simple animation using puppet motion so Icould mask out the body motions for the head shots and stop the arms breakingthrough the straight jackets. The lipsync for the characters was pretty straightforward using AccuLips. I then set aboutaddressing the character performances using the Face Key editor.
Step 6 : Lighting
The lighting setup was very simple for the headshots and Imainly relied on a single spot light to drive the lighting for the group shotwhich I wanted to be dark and gloomy. While I didn’t notice it at the time, Irealised later that the background smoke was actually impacting the hair of themain character in the final shot ( very annoying).
Step 7 : Final Render
The project was rendered in iclone and then furtherprocessed in Final Cut Pro X. I added a “surreal” effect to the mouth shots tomake them look less stark and more interesting. I tried this and a number ofother styling effects on the group shot, but ended up feeling the iclone finalrender worked best in its original state. Only the final hero close-up has aneffect applied. I experimented with adding a music track of the song in a more“horror” feel, firstly to identify the song before the vocals start but also toadd to the drama. The main instrumental theme of the song was too long to useand I preferred the voices only approach, so I just used a short teaser in theopening billboard.
I was pretty pleased with the end result as the look and therendition of singing is not something I have done before. I now appreciate that AccuLips is a majorenhancement to the iclone suite and am confident it will help me makesignificant improvement on my future facial animation.
Here is the final video as my 3rd entry into the contest.Enjoy!