Applied Animation: Lip Sync Testing

To kick start production I have gone ahead and started to create a lip sync chart to refer to for the wolf character (Katy will be doing the Boar character, as this is the character she is animating). By doing this, I feel that it will help animating the speech a little easier because I will have the basic mouth shapes to refer to already, rather than having to animate from imagination or having a mirror with me everywhere I go. Using the reference I collected earlier in the week and using a mirror, I was able to come up with a range of different mouth shapes that I feel are a good starting point and from there I decided to draw those mouth shapes on a wolf's snout.

Phoneme Sheet

They aren't perfect, but they give me a good understanding of what kind of shapes I should be aiming for when I begin to animate my character. They also helped me a great deal when I conducted an animated lip sync test.

I found lip syncing to be quite fun if I'm going to be honest. It isn't something I've ever done before but I was really excited about trying something new and challenging myself. I was also really excited about animating again, as I feel that it has been a while since I've animated something this challenging. At first I found it a little difficult to match up the mouth shapes with the audio but I got there in the end and it didn't take me as long as I thought it would, but it did take quite a while to complete. However, with practice, I feel that I will be able to pick up the pace as we go through our animation. 

I decided to animate to a clip from our animation, as I thought it would be relevant and give me enough practice. I started by planning out the key frames to match the text at the side of my animation, which helped me a lot and made it easier for me to match the mouth movements to the audio.  When I began to animate (without audio) I felt that it went too quick, so I exported the small clip at 12 fps and placed it with the audio and I instantly realised that it was too slow. So I kept it at 24fps, but held some of the frames on the vowels to make the mouth sty in certain positions for longer. 

Animation at 12fps

As I was animating and looking back through the clip I noticed that I had placed a mouth movement for the 'A' in 'humans' and I thought that it looked a little strange, but I couldn't be sure, so I exported the clip and put it with the audio to see how it fit.

I realised that the 'A' shape wasn't needed at all and removed it from the sequence. This made the mouth movements look a lot more natural and it looked a lot less confusing to watch too. I also feel that it matched the audio quite well and I was pleased with how it looked, which made me want to finish the sentence, so I did. 

I'm really pleased with my first attempt at lip syncing. I feel that it matches the audio quite well and I've learnt a lot about re-using frames and animating efficiently. I've also learnt that you don't necessarily have to place in every single mouth movement but focus more on the sounds that create the syllables for that word and focus on those shapes instead. I've also noticed that it works really well if you 'pop' from one shape to the next and ease out of them rather than easing into them too. 

It's not perfect and I feel that there is room for improvement, but I am confident that I have a good understanding of how it works to start production.