Creating a conversation

There's a good chance that your cartoon will contain characters talking to one another. This is how a plot progresses in films and the same goes for cartoons as well. To approach creating such a sequence may be a bit overwhelming. How do you keep things interesting? Should you do any animation other than the mouth movements? This lesson should help with that.

First, let's open the file ConversationStart.anme. This file contains two characters we can use to create a conversation.

Situating mouth poses and audio files

To begin with, you will need to decide how you want to approach animating mouths. You will remember that we discussed techniques such as use of Smart Bones and the Switch layers. Pick one that you are comfortable with.

In the case of this exercise, we will use the Switch layers and draw out a series of mouth poses. We will refer to these as phonemes. Phonemes are the poses our mouths make when we make different sounds. This includes "S", "Th", "O", and "F...