Research
While doing research on lip-sync animation, I found some tutorials by Sir Wade Neistadt where he goes over some of the basics when it comes to lip-sync animations. He talks about his typical work flow, which involves in him blocking out his acting animations first and doing the lip-sync as the final stage in the animation process. He also breaks done the different elements of the mouth shape that you need to consider such as the movement of the jaw, the corners of the mouth and the movement of the tongue. He also explains that we see the movement of the mouth before we hear the dialogue, so we should have the mouth shapes play a frame or two before we hear the sound.
I also found this tutorial by Skitty Animates to be very helpful as well. While she gives similar advice to Sir Wade, she aslo talks about setting up mouth shapes than can then be used as they are needed in the lip sync. Once she finished blocking out her lipsync she then goes back and makes some changes t the shapes to help portray the emotions of the dialogue. She also talks about the importance of animating towards the camera, so that no extra details are missed due to them not being seen as a result of the camera angle .
Although I am doing 3D animation I still found this tutorial by Devon Kong to be helpful, as he goes into a lot of detail about each of the different mouth shapes as the same theory still applies for 3D animation.
Reference
For the mouth shapes, I found the following reference guides to be very helpful as they gave me an idea for all the different mouth shapes that I would need:
(Guide by Devon Kong)
(Guide on Reallusion’s site)
I also acted out the dialogue myself to figure out the body movements for my animation. While working on the lip-sync I mouthed out the dialogue while looking in a mirror to get a realistic idea for the movement of the lips and the jaw. I found this also really helped to ensure that I wasn’t over exaggerating the movement of the lips, as I could see which shapes would blend together.
Self Critique
I’m quite happy with how this assignment went. I never came across any major problems during this project, other than having to adjust some poses so that the the character didn’t awkwardly jump between poses. These issues were easily solved by either deleting unnecessary key frames or using the graph chart to fix the poses. As for feedback, I would regularly send my works to my friends to get their opinions. Their feedback really helped me when working on the facial expressions, such as the expression changing too early or the eyes opening or closing too fast/slow.
I’m personally quite happy with this animation. I think the poses and expressions really help to portray the sassy character that I wanted to show. I think the lip-sync turned out pretty well, and I tried to make sure that the mouth movement didn’t seem too exaggerated. However, I do think there are one or two words that definitely could be worked on some more, as they can’t be read clearly due to the lip shapes.
Overall I’ve really enjoyed this assignment and I’ve learned a lot more about lip-syncing. I definitely plan to do more of these soon, as I’m eager to improve in this area of animation.