Router, or Rooter?

Lost in translation Lipsync:

My idea came from a memory of when I stayed at my friend’s flat in Sydney. I had asked her where the [WIFI] router was. With my English accent, I pronounce router as ‘rooter’. She found this hilarious and told me that in Australia a rooter is a prostitute.

For the script, I wrote many versions of me telling the story as if it were a documentary. One of the constraints of the project was that it was meant to be 10 seconds or less, so I had to work on keeping it concise. This led me to change the narrative so that it was coming from the perspective of a sexy WIFI router exploring both identities (Router or Rooter?). I decided that prescribing the story was not great, as explaining a joke can make it less funny. I suppose this limits the audience of the video to Australians and those who know about the culture.

The next step was recording, I recorded myself trying different versions, and having my classmate film me so that I could reference the shape my lips made.

From that, I mapped out the words and drew the mouth shapes next to each word/part, ready to add them to the recording.

I also spent a long time on character design, looking up pictures of WIFI routers on the internet to experiment with different shapes, sizes, and working out what would have enough of a body to be able to gesture, but what would be easily recognisable as a router.

I ended up settling with this design:

Now that I had the rough character design and recording, I then mapped out key frames using tv paint. I wanted the body gesture to mimic the words.

My tutor watched this and advised that I watch the Pixar film ‘Cars’, as it’s an excellent example of inanimate boxy objects brought to life. After watching it I went back to my animation with a new consideration of squash and stretch to bring a character to life.

I was happier with the exaggerated movement of the box but felt that I needed to strike a balance to make it seem believable to the viewer that it was really a box, so I used the new version and made a neater one over the top.

Another organisational technique I’ve learnt from this course is that it’s really important to draw each limb/component of the character on separate levels, each iteration I had drawn everything on one layer, and it meant that it was hard to keep the proportions right. I then re drew each component on a separate layer, and it fixed the problem.

It’s been a long process getting to this point, and I think in the future I would separate the layers well in advance, but I am happy with the result, the next step will be colour.