Star Wars Uncut - Something Is Wrong

Star Wars Uncut scene 2 complete, and with only hours to spare. I honestly believe the only reason I completed this was because I had so much energy behind it after creating the first background. This was actually the original scene I was going to choose, and now after completing both I know I should have followed my gut. However, I'm still glad I got to do both because they were good experiences for different reasons. As I said in my Landing At Bespin post, I appreciated the attention to detail that went into these shots, and I also had fun playing with color. For my 'Something Is Wrong' scene I got to play around more with character animations which was a lot of fun. Yet the attention to detail was still there in this scene as well (I love the ship that flies by right as Han kisses Leia.)

Here is the original clip:

One of the challenges of replicating this scene was that there are a lot of human movements that are difficult to recreate using 2D characters. For example, right at the cut Leia spins around to look at the door. This movement is almost impossible to achieve the way I typically animate, so I had to do some "frame by frame" animation to achieve the look. If I had had more time I would have liked to add a few more tweens in this sequence.

I got lucky with Han, I could pretty much fake all his motion with only one 2D character.

Here you can take a closer look at the backgrounds. I had the most fun making these environments simply because they are so visually perfect that when you replicate them they are bound to look good. I put the frame around it because I wanted my final video to remain compositionally close to what the original was, and 16:9 simply wasn't cutting it.  Once again it's all in the details, I especially love the light that comes in from the ceiling and splashes on the wall.

Lastly, my final challenge was to make Han talk. I have never really done lip syncing in any of my Mean Mug & Slim work, but I had recently seen a tutorial and wanted to give it a try.

Below is the tutorial and an image I was working from to help create the different mouths.  I am pretty happy with how it came out, the only thing I would do differently next time is add a few more mouth variations.  There were a few occasions where I felt like none of the mouth shapes worked.