Applied Animation: Further Research into Lip Syncing

In order to help me with getting to grips with this whole lip syncing business (because it's difficult, really difficult) I decided to sit down and watch a range clips from multiple animations that have talking animals in them. which turned out to help. A lot.

To start with I focused on animations that had dogs, wolves, foxes, etc, as our wolf character would be doing he majority of the talking in our animation. Plus the wolf is my main character throughout production, so I felt it was appropriate to start here. I started off with All Dogs go to Heaven, both one and two. There's a lot of singing within these two films and it allowed me to watch how their mouths moved to lots of speech with ease. I noticed that their mouths focus on forming the vowels and the shape of the syllables rather than trying to form the whole word. Despite the worked not being fully formed it was still really effective and the mouth shapes still represented the word being spoken.

Facial Expressions of Charlie from All Dogs go to Heaven

I found that it was quite similar in The Fox and The Hound, however, their mouths seemed to have a lot more movement, which made it flow with a lot more fluidity and made the words run into one another a lot cleaner. In fact I found this to be the case with all of the Disney films that I looked at including, Oliver and Company and The Lion King. 

The Fox and The Hound

I completed my research by watching Balto all the way through, just to get a full understanding of how the animals mouths were animated by a range of different companies. I found Balto particularly helpful, as the main character is a wolf, giving me a very good reference point to work from. 

Clip from Balto

I also did the same for the other two characters and looked at films such as, The Lion King (for Pumba), Babe, Charlotte's Web, Animal Farm, and Creature Comforts. All of these animations are really good examples of how lip syncing has been done successfully. What I have noticed across all of them is that emphasis is placed on either the vowel of the word or the syllables rather than the pronunciation of each letter. This is something I will definitely stick to when I come to animate my own characters talking. I've also noticed that a lot of the mouth movements are exaggerated, again something that I will keep in mind to practice when I come to do my own lip syncing. I feel that I have a really good selection of reference points to look at and I feel that I would benefit from creating my Phoneme chart for each of the characters, so I will make this my next stepping stone.