Research
Lip syncing is something that I haven’t practiced at all really, so for this assignment it was what I was most scared to do. Like any animation I do, I went off and researched how to approach animating to a set dialogue and how to think as I am drawing.
The first thing I was introduced to was Phonemes, these are the mouth shapes that your character will make as they talk and are based on the phonetic sound that comes out. I went ahead and looked at some different examples of phonemes, from more extreme and cartoony to more restrained versions.
Then I watched this video from Aaron Blaise to see how a professional approaches this kind of task. I am always amazed at how scientific elements can contribute to art, for this we want to have the mouth shapes settle before the sound because light travels faster than sound. We also don’t have to hit every sound, you need to feel and capture how words are felt since we usually flow through speech. It is really interesting to see him scrub through his work and try to break down his process so that I can practice from that.
In class we were given this base head and had to try some lip-syncing, using a phoneme chart online and really try to feel the shapes. As I worked I found what helped me was to say the dialogue, just repeatedly, and feel how my mouth between each shape and then I would draw this. This went okay, I did notice that the rest of the face felt a bit stiff as I created this, so for my lip-sync I will try incorporate things like the chin moving to rely cement that my character is saying it.
I really love this animators work, I think it is really great. In particular I am using this video to understand how to exaggerate acting for animation, and this is seen towards the end of Corax’s video. Seeing how they play up the mouth movements, really add acting and staging into the character, instead of just recreating him sitting solidly and recreating the dialogue. This gives the dialogue a lot more context, enforces the tone and just gives it a bit more life, all things that I will try and infuse into my animation.
Then I had a look at how in a big production, they used recorded reference to help with lip sync. I took note that staging, different camera angles and multiple takes were used to help them capture the emotion in their dialogue. Also that while they are closely recreating storyboards/actions they want they don’t accurately copy this reference, instead they use it as a guide for the final product.
For my dialogue I decided to use this unforgettable scene from the Scott Pilgrim movie. I was also able to use this as some video reference.
Then I went and filmed some references of my own, which I then edited together in Premiere Pro to recreate that flow. I put these on Sync Sketch so that I was able to flick through them and make notes pretty quickly. I had a couple different takes and decided to use these 2 angles, one for emotion and action and another to focus more on my mouth movements and expressions.
Then I went and did some rough passes on the layout of my scene, I wanted to get the body movements down first so that adding the phonemes would be easier to focus on later. I then refined this out a bit and tried to keep in mind the principles of animation, easing, follow-through, etc to create believable movements (and I wanted to have a balance of moving body and still since the more my character moved the harder it would be to add in the lip-sync).
I translated the rough storyboard into some Key frames, following along with my filmed references and the original clip reference.
Then I moved onto adding my phonemes, this was were I got annoyed at my particular style for this piece. I really enjoy looking at other animators’ characters that have these big interesting mouths and interesting shapes, this is something that I intend to practice and improve on (Drawing more stylised and cartoony as well as being able to recreate other styles since this is important for an animator who wants to work on productions). Despite that I tried to keep in mind all my research up to this point, using the charts seen above as well as sounding out the dialogue myself I created some basic phonemes and trying to delay the mouth before the sound comes through. I tried to add some variety and interest in their teeth, one of them having a snaggle fang and the other having a little gap. The other thing that I had to keep in mind was that one character had food in their mouth so I decided to show this by having the cheek puffed up.
I then went and adjusted some of my phonemes to better take on advice from Aaron Blaise, before adding on my chin movement and other facial animation. I also started to key out some of my secondary action here, I wanted the bunny ears to be nice and floppy to fit with the cheery/naïve character and then the wolf ears would be more restrained to match the more blunt character. You can also see I make some notes as I work to remind myself to experiment or change certain movements to flow better.
I also had this weird issue where these squares with lines kept appearing on my timeline, a quick google search told me this was motion keys that I must have accidentally enabled. To fix this I just hit CTRL L and the connected lines stopped.
Then I worked on tweening up the ear movement as well as changing some of the body movement. I realised in my storyboard my character had the plate then didn’t and I thought that looked a bit strange, so I worked on having them put the plate down. before instead of carrying it through the animation, because why make more work for myself. I have started to try use timing charts more functionally in my work and focus on thinking of when and why I should ease in and out- this helped a lot when correcting my jump landing movement and my throw on the weight lift. I also like to add some follow through and drag onto my actions to give them more appeal.
Then I started to add some hair, I started with some general keys and then worked to try tween them. I tried to have the hair flick out and drag behind when the head moved, keeping in mind that hair is light, but also finding a balance of not over animating the movement. I separated the front and the back of the hair into different layers, this made it a lot easier to manage the different frames and movements. I also went and finished up those facial expressions. I decided to remove my initial establishing shot for this assignment as I was running out of time, so I decided to quickly add elements into each characters background for some interest and establishing they are different.
I was able to send Alec the above pass for some feedback. Overall, he liked my expressions and lip syncing and I just needed to have a look at some ear movements that looked a bit twitchy. I made the adjustments and then I had noted that one of the character’s eyes was a bit far, and the others hair has this weird moment on the bang movement, but these are pretty small issues that I’m not sure that I will have time to clean up for this assignment- especially since after sending to Alec he didn’t point these out as an issue.
Overall, I am pretty happy with my progress with lip-syncing for animation. I have learnt a lot about how to approach this in 2D and 3D software and it isn’t something that I am scared of now, in fact it was pretty fun. I learnt how to use phonemes and match these up to dialogue, I started to understand how to act for animation ( how to get a nice balance between overacting vs using more subtle movements for effect), I improved on some animation principles like my solid drawing and using secondary/overlapping actions to create some more personality in my characters. I am not entirely happy with how all of my movements came out, especially with some of that hair and facial animation but this is something I will continue to practice to get better at character animation, I want to experiment in more styles (more cartoony and over the top vs more refined and subtle movements), so that when I work in the industry I can adapt to different projects styles.