2D Animation And Lip-sync using Clip Studio Paint

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Manleonardo

Manleonardo

HOW HARD 2D ANIMATION IS?

2D animation is HARD, normally you need to paint the entire animation 4 times to achieve clean line art, but this is just the process of trying to move a drawing in time, the harder part is to create the illusion of life in your animation. This is not easy to achieve but Clip Studio gave you the tools necessary to work towards this goal. The thing I like about CSP animation tools is that the experience is really close to the traditional animation in paper. You can flip the drawings (F9 go forward, F7 backward), you can use the light table to place your drawings closer together or in an angle, you can even create templates that look like the real A4 paper used in animation production. But the thing is that because it is software, the capabilities it presents go far beyond what is possible with a pencil and paper. Since I started using CSP, I've been trying to find a way to work that allows me to take advantage of all the features of the software and speed up the animation process. Doing the research to learn how to use the software I found an artist called Nicca, he has a very professional pipeline, but very complex for my taste, you know I'm lazy, and I try to make things as easy and fast as possible. My process is very different from the one used in professional productions, but for me it makes sense and if you are interested in knowing it, please watch this part of the tutorial on YouTube where I explain how I made an animated sketch.

But first I want to share two files that you can use as templates for animation.

If you are interested in learning how to create templates in Clip Studio, please follow the instructions in this video:

USING AUDIO WITH CLIP STUDIO

Clip Studio lets you import audio files to your animations, and support files like WAV, MP3, and OGG. Previewing and scrubbing let you see and fine-tune your animation as you're working on it, but unfortunately, CSP doesn’t play audio until you play the animation, this makes the lip-sync hard but is not a deal-breaker, because you can use an audio software like Audacity or Audition to synchronize the animation and audio. In the end, you must use audio software for the recording of voice and the sound effects, the extra step of finding the placement for the lip-sync is just another step in your process. In this video, you can see how to work it out.

Next, I will show you the summary of how to synchronize the animation with the audio.

SYNCHRONIZE ANIMATION TO AUDIO

In my sketch I want to place some sound effects to emphasize parts of the animation, for example, the sound of the steps of the character, so in my animation, I know where the sound start, in frames 9, 25 and 41, but this is not second but frames so how can I place it in the right spot in the audio?

First, you need to know that because I’m animating at 24 FPS (frames per second) it means that I can know the position in time for a specific frame, just dividing 1 in 24, that gave me the duration time of 1 frame that is 0.4167 seconds. So by multiplying 0.4167 by the frame, example 9 gives me the time for the first step that happened in the second 0.38.

 

The next step is to go to your audio editing software, find the time, and paste the sound effect. This way I could synchronize the sound effects and the animation.

SYNCHRONIZE AUDIO TO ANIMATION

Is possible that you need the opposite, to synchronize the audio to the animation, in the sketch I have dialog and I needed a way to find out the position of each word to do the lip-sync, so what I did was scrubbing the audio until I found out the time and length of each word. Using the time I can know the frame in which every word will start and finish. So because one second equals 24 frames just multiply the time in seconds by 24 and so I found the position of each word in the animation, for example, the word “no” happens in the second 4.112 by 24 frames equals frame 99 so this is the beginning of this word, in the image you can see the position of the words in the timeline using “Create track label”.

To use the tool “Create track label” just go to the frame where you start the action, in the Animation menu / label / Create track label (D), write the name of the label and the range in frames you need, this guarantees a clear visualization and then make the lip-sync an easy task.

If you want to see the complete sketch of this animation you can see it in my YouTube channel.

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpiLsu6xhp4S8OVxp-ltf7A

Thank you, I hope this tutorial is easy to follow if there is any doubt please let me know.

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