Promo art
Lil 'P's Dance Exercise
Lil 'P's Dance Exercise is a 4k animated short based off of the Fairy Penguinos characters. Lil 'P shares their dynamic and supernova-charged exercise and dance routine with the audience. Bell and Luther join in and follow the beat with stars, moons, nebulae and galaxies galore in bright colors and high detail.
Project Details
The project began when I was influenced by a dance sequence in a TV show. Fairy Penguinos also love to dance and sing, and one of Lil 'P's pasttimes is dancing! Cute space penguinos dancing was the only rational solution~
First, a storyboard and rough drafts of what Lil 'P, Bell and Luther would look like were drafted. They wear headbands to block the sweat. Lil 'P has an orange ribbon-headband, Bell has an alien green headband with the two antenna attached (that wobble a lot), and Luther's has red bear ears.
For the most part, the animation followed the storyboard but changes were made as the project progressed. You don't really know how things will turn out until you start drawing and animating out and then adding the effects - and sometimes you might be limited but you work around the limitations whether they are technological or skill-based, learning new things along the way! The script was then written with action and camera descriptions included, based off of the storyboard.
Next, the first draft of the animation. To keep the time spent at a minimum, Bell and Luther use the same body as Lil 'P is some frames, but they still had their unique hair, headband and other details drawn and animated over Lil 'P's layer.
VTuber Phonemes Problem Solving
Instead of drawing the mouth movements or placing them frame-by-frame using my own phoneme method, I used my vtuber model of Lil 'P's and recorded the audio with the mouth movement included. This gave me great control over consistency of the size of the mouths and placement. First, the mouth was simply zoomed in on the vtuber model with Lil 'P's head and body still recorded, but later, I was able to isolate the mouth from the body by tweaking the settings of my model in Vtube Studio. I used two mouth movements - side view and front view. It worked out well, but the key to making it all come together was good organization and labeling of the files. The frames at which the mouth and audio were to be attached needed to be recorded as well.
When each character moved, key frames needed to be created for the movement of the mouth. Overall, the vtuber recorded mouths blend well with the rest of the animation and I will be using this method in the future!~
