A few years back, I was writing dialog for a cat with a Scottish
accent. He was from the Richard Longtails series. His name was Finlay McFinn. At
the time I was having trouble bringing out his unique accent without it being too
distracting. It seemed that I was either overdoing it, or not doing it enough.
(It’s
a delicate line to walk.)
Anyways, because I was having so much trouble, I decided to
do a study of pronunciation through TTC. It was a short course, but at the time it didn’t
really help much with my writing. I
remember how the instructor emphasized his words. He would explain how all these
different shapes and muscles in our faces could produce the sounds that we use
to make speech.
I found it kind of fascinating, but it also felt rather pointless.
After the course was done, I walked away thinking: “Speech is a natural thing,
why am I studying this?”
I guess you could make the argument that any knowledge is
good knowledge, if applied in the right situation. But at the time, I couldn't fathom
an application to where I’d be using this information; I hadn’t a clue that I
would be pursuing animation, so the thought never occurred to me.
Now as I’m faced with the task of rigging morph targets for
characters, I’m pleased to have taken that course, because now I have an
underlying concept of what’s going on (physically) when someone say’s
something.
For me, morph targets are new ground. It will be interesting to see them in
action.
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