This week we were really getting into the idea of acting and the fundamentals of good lip sync. This involved us looking at our vowels and breaking down the shapes; our mouths take to create phonemes, for example, our mouths take this small circle shape like you are about to whistle or kiss someone. We did have some good references like Richard Williams one in the survival kit. The idea behind this to break down the jaws movements to create these phonemes as even though our lips do a lot of the movement jaw does an equal amount in helping create the illusion of speech and it’s also useful in the way it can help exaggerate some expressions especially if the character has a an accent. The best way to get the feel of these shapes isn’t to just look at a ref but something my tutors and a few articles online really hammer in is to either video yourself or have a mirror on your desk to test out these phonemes yourself as you are the best ref for something like this.
This led to the call task of lip synchronizing to a short video where we had to lip synchronize to a prerecord line and break it down to animate it better. The first step was to identify each part of the words we would hear like any mm and Ch we see in the script and mark where they would be in the timeline. Here we learnt a sort of law or rule that it is best to start each phoneme at least 2 frames ahead of the recording as that goes a long way in making the animation look clean and fluid.
Then once these were set in stone, we used our reference sheets with our phonemes directly animated to our set plan. Overall, this process was good, and I do feel that this method will help me during my actual lip sync but for the animation. Though I could have bridged the phonemes together better with one frame as a transition between each one to help it flow better because it looks blocky and jittery. I also have seemed to createa bad habit of volume control where the vowel phonemesappear a few times but allows at a larger sizewhere is create this weird effect whereitcreates this weird effect where the character looks like he is talking at one moment and yelling another. I think to fix this I would either need to be more careful while animating or put a limit guide on the mouth to keep track of any extreme key pose so I could better adjust the phonemes to match the feel of the scene and performance.
For my weight lift I got the feedback I needed to move forward with, this came down to a few things like some unassay frames and holding in some spaces as the start of the film was a bit too fast. The way I fixed this was to add some extra key frames into pacific pars of the build-up of the breath and the exhaled so that it lasts longer and so it just does not go straight into the lift as we have time to settle before the main event. I do think at this really helped the pacing of the piece as a whole and communicate everything that bit better. then there were some frames at the start when the character walks up to the sword which felt unassay and I was recommend to start with the charter at the sword instead of moving towards the sword. This felt a lot better than before and didn’t evolve me having to plan out a walk unlike my lip sync so in the long run this will save me a lot of time in the future.
For my lip sync I was redoing a lot of the location controls as I had used the root control to move the character around the scene instead of having the charter walk off it within the scene. This meant I had to use the feet controls along with the hips to have the character walk around the scene which was easy enough to do I do think when it some’s to it I will need to do some polishing to it but for now I’m happy with the block. Then I made a started on the inbetweening stage of the piece this and while I was doing this I was looking at each time rain moves her head into an extreme pose so I could animate a blink into it as that further adds an extra layer of realism to the piece and helps her feel a bit more alive in the process.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/Y74jgkzJulAp/
