Mouuth// OCT 2016 Visuals at Headrow House

Mouuth is a Leeds based music experience, containing the talents of Alex Podraza and James Grimshaw. You can find their FACEBOOK PAGE here.

I've been working with the pair creating illustrations over the past few months, such as an icon for their Social Media pages. Yesterday MOUUTH preformed at Headrow House in Leeds with animated visuals I'd created for the gig. The projected visuals was a 5 second looping animation of a mouth; the mouth made 4 different expressions, each expression lasting roughly 1 second each and each expression had a different identifying colour.

The Brief 

Original MOUUTH animated GIF 

MOUUTH asked me to create some visuals for their gig. I had already animated a little gif for their social media, of a mouth opening and closing and they both wanted something similar. We discussed the possibility of me triggering certain animated clips manually but because of time constraints and lack of software, I was asked to create a self-looping animation. I animated the first GIF using a 'rough' rotoscope technique. I first filmed someone opening and closing their mouth and then in photoshop, traced loosely over the lip moment. I added the teeth, tongue and shadows/highlighting myself. MOUUTH wanted the same 'feel' to the visuals and requested I produced something similar to the GIF they were already using. I had about a week to create the animation so began working from the first briefing. 

Creation 

I filmed my own mouth as reference footage for this brief, all together I filmed 15 expressions and then picked 5 of what I thought was the best (most disgusting). Using photoshop I created a set of different Video-Groups in the Timeline feature, in order to quicken the animation process. I animated different pieces of the mouth on separate layers, to produce a much cleaner animation and much faster animation process. Using separate layer groups also allowed me to shadow certain parts of the mouth little by little - like placing depth on the teeth and not the entire inner mouth, by shadowing the corners of the teeth animated layer.  I rendered each 1 second animated mouth out in photoshop, as well as a 'base' posed mouth that was slightly animated to maintain movement within the animation. 

Reference Footage

Using Multiple Layers

Post-Production

Finished mouth (mouth 1)

In post I used After Effects at university to bring together all of the rendered clips. I had also created a 3-framed (24FPS) texture animation that would give the animation a slight sinister disturbing tone, that would work with MOUUTH and their music perfectly. To do this I changed the opacity of the textured animation to 20% in order for the animation beneath to be seen and still carry across the texture.  After adding the texture I rendered out the looping animation to check for mistakes...

I planned to have each mouth change its own colours with each expression, so within After Effects I took the rendered animation and applied a HUE over the top of each of the different mouth segments. I moved though the colour wheel in the hue opinion to change the over all colour theme from purple to red to yellow to blue. Finally, I rendered the finished animation out.  I also rendered out a slightly more 'faded' animation, to give MOUUTH the opinion of a more faded grungy visuals if they wanted; but they fell in love with the neons. 

Live 

That my Mouth and MOUUTHs Mouth

At the Headrow House venue the gig space seemed massive, light up with netted fairy lights and spotlights that could maybe blind. The venue space was already fitted with the projection screen and a projector, which was build into the ceiling above the stage. My laptop was plugging into the over-head projected and pushed up into the ceiling whilst MOUUTH preformed. Before MOUUTH began I started the loop and left my laptop up on the vents. Although I wasn't controlling the animation manually, the rhythm to the visuals worked well with the live music. MOUUTHs set lasted about 30 minutes and after the gig I was approached by other artists that played that night about my visuals. I really enjoyed working with MOUUTH and can't wait to work with them more.