Our tutor extended the deadline because nobody of us had been finished on friday when we normally have our presentation. So we did the presentation yesterday in the afternnoon and it was great fun to see the puppets come to life again, but perhaps for the last time of the course. No more animation then, because now we have to edit our showreel for the very final presentation on Friday of next week. The last exercise was lip sync, and with this also much more character animation. We got several small pieces of spoken soundfiles which we could use. We also could record our own things, but that would have taken much more time. Because then you have to do the breakdown, too. So we could use already finished dopesheets for the spoken words and just have to work out the acting. My idea was to animate a news reporter who is so bored by his job that he's not really interested in what he's talking about and that's why he also is badly prepared.
The spoken text is,

"Well, we got a pretty serious sitaution here... Our peripherals are a bit edgy and our centre is equidistant... And an... ah... Oh well... why... I don't know what I'm talking about..."

This is one of the original frames:
I did a kind of greenscreen to cut the puppet out and combine it with some hurricane video:

EDIT: I just have seen that the is a problem with flash and the audio, because the image seems to be quicker than the audio. Stupid Flash! So, if you'd like to see the quicktime (8,5 MB), follow this link, until I find a solution for this problem:

reporter320x240.mov

My animation is still improving and I really enjoy that. But the acting of the puppet could be a much more precise, the eyebrows for example could be used more intensively, I think. But the general idea may come along. Please ignore the moving hair, not ist wavy behaviour but its location changing... ;) I animated it on ones. You could have done it on doubles but The hair waving is nicer that way. What did I do then? I tried to have a plain background with flat light and any seen shadows. I animated the puppet in front of the screen with my framegrabber, in this case StopMotion Pro and DV Pal camera with a normal 720x576 resolution. Then I took all the frames as footage into After Effects Pro and used the Keylight effect which works pretty good. I also could have combined several colour keys to get a good result. Because they all works well but not perfectly, I used another effect to improve the matte (hope, I have the right vocabulary here, because I'm using a German version of AE). Then I did some colour and exposure correction on the foreground to fit it together. For the backgroud I used a internet movie from a hurricane just to have a look how it might look, so it's not my footage in the background. After this, I put it together in Final Cut Pro, adding the sound file and the stormy sound, too and exported it. Tadaa!

Things I would to different the next time: If you extend the distance between the puppet and the background you would avoid shadows more and you would have less green reflections on the puppet. The more separated the colours from the background compared to those in the puppet, the better you key is working. And I also would try to find a more saturated background, this one was just improvised. I would use a better camera. One of the problems I had during the keying was the low res pictures. The better your resolution is, the better the key could work and the better your final matte would be. That's why the puppet's egdes are moving a lot. Feel free to learn from my mistakes.