The lip sync was the part of this assignment I was looking forward to the most but it actually proved the most challenging and it hit me kind of hard because I thought I was actually quite good at lip syncs! They are what I enjoy animating the most; I even started a small AMV project over the summer with a lot of lip syncing in it to practice.
I wanted to animate a lip sync as good as this in ToonBoom and I think I kind of missed the mark, which is disappointing but I think I have gained some valuable insight into why my past ones have worked well and why I think this one hasn’t.
To start off I had to pick an audio and I had 5 in mind I wanted to do but I landed on a Bojack audio which I took some reference footage for.
I knew going into this audio it would be more challenging than previous ones I have used simply because the characters are talking so fast and I knew it would be hard to hit all the vowels and consonants correctly. So I usually just go with whatever it sounds like their saying so if a character says ‘You’ you don’t really hear the ‘Y’ and ‘o’ so I just animate a longer ‘U’ mouth shape, which helps keep things simple.
However, I also thought I could get the most expression and emotion out of this audio than the others I had in mind.
Unlike my weightlift, I didn’t block this one out, although I had intended to but due to time constraints, I just started animating straight away.
I also did not stick to one lip sync chart; instead, I sort of frakensteined three different ones together, which I started using more so towards the end part of the lip sync but I think this really helped the timing of the lip sync.
I did this because I was very frustrated with the lack of variety the ToonBoom lip chart had to offer and I thought, in all honesty, it made the animation look boring and I felt like if I was holding a certain sound or lingering on a certain word for example, ‘library’ (I particularly struggled with animating this word), I thought mixing two different ‘R’ lip shapes would give more variety to the way the words were being spoken; otherwise, I thought it looked stiff and unappealing.
As time went on in animating, I found I much heavily leaned on the bottom left chart and top right chart, splicing in the ToonBoom one for big vowel sounds.
I also got the idea for the scene from lecturer Rachel from the lip sync exercise we did with the rain model in class, as we both agreed that the scene set up for that exercise would work well for my chosen audio (sitting at a chair at a coffee table).
There was originally a chair sketched in behind my character but I removed it because I felt like you couldn’t see their lips move that well.
I’m not very happy with this end result at all. I think the start of the animation, where I was more heavily reliant on ToonBoom’s lip chart, looks quite bad. I also got some feedback on that part at the time because I felt like there was something quite off about it back when I only had the ‘What’s That’ animated and I wasn’t sure what it was and Aodhan gave some advice that I was trying to do too much in such a sort of space of time and that it’s okay to just let there be minimal movement. So going forward from that point on, I let certain frames linger because I did feel like at the start I was trying to cram in as much movement as possible and it was just ending up looking messy.
My main issue with this piece of animation is that the first half, I think, looks quite bad but then as it goes on, you can see where I really got the hang of it and I would love to do this over again for my portfolio because I think it could become something a lot better.
I eventually want to specialise in character animation, particularly in characters lip-syncing, because I think its so amazing how much personality you can get out of a character when they’re talking.
Eventually I would like to develop my skills to this level:
Where you can really get a sense of how characters think and feel by how they talk, like Milo, who is frantic and nervous, talks much more with his hands, while Cookie, who is more cool and calm, doesn’t talk with his hands open and moving that much and it is used rather sparingly with him.
I tried to add in a few pieces of hand animation while my character was talking but I don’t think it was as good as it could have been. However, previously, when I was animating lip syncs, I was animating on 16 FPS, which is what I use in my own animations and switching to 24 was quite challenging as I felt I almost had too many frames to work with.