A little confusing on the weeks layout but between these two weeks, we finally got to the lip sync which was the more complicated part between the 3. During my lecture, in both 2D and 3D I was provided some images of ‘mouths’ known as Phoneme shapes as shown below:
These are heavily used as references for doing lip sync when animating to capture the shape of how the mouth should look when spitting out specific sounds. When looking into phoneme shapes it made it slightly nostalgic bringing it back to this video that I watched as a kid ☻
PERFORMANCE ANIMATION
Performance animation personally to me is where we have real recorded reference which helps animators understand an action they’re trying to capture, with the real life actors we can see the arcs in the movement and what type of facial expressions go along with the movement. It also allows us to stage the scene in the frame and mainly timing.
Also, helps the animator not be stuck on where to start animating without a reference which I really need to start doing more. Having a look at this animation, the animation has all the action from the real life actor but then there is adjustment to give it some extra spice and personality.
2D ANIMATION LIPSYNC
While for my 2D animation we were provided a file with audio, too bad for my I had gotten rid of my toon boom license. Instead of sitting in class and twiddling my finger, I took one of the provided audio and slapped up a quick drawing to start animating some simple lip sync. The overall look is extremely stiff, I wished I had added in some jaw movements and facial expression but I think I’ve got the timing and what shape of the mouth to use for certain sounds.
The feedback I received was that I needed to exaggerate the shapes of the mouth which in this style it is possible, again this is my first time doing a lip sync so I’m pretty happy with how this came out ☻
BLENDER LIP SYNC
We were first introduce how to set up different shapes and have them saved, this allows me to easily jump between the different shapes instead of adjusting the lips. I’ll most likely be using this for my own personal 3D animation work since it’s pretty efficient and fun to play around.
Anyway here’s my fun lip sync exercise: