Animation techniques explained: Lip syncing

Hi Steemit!

Yesterday my partner @charlotteblacker created a post about how we made a knitted animated moster movie for Long Division music festival. There are many processes to go through when creating an animated film so I decided to write some posts explaining some of these processes more in depth. This post is about how we figured out and implemented the lip syncing into the film.

Explanation for lip syncing

Lip syncing in animation is when you figure out which mouth shapes are needed for the words spoken by the voice over artist. We assign the correct mouth shapes to the spoken words. We use phonetic mouth shapes for this.

Phonetic mouth shapes are mouths posed in the shape of the sound they make. Here is an illustrated example below:

These are the basic shapes you need to say pretty much any word however, you may want to create some additional shapes for example if your character is laughing or shouting you may want a more exaggerated version of the shapes above. There may be other reasons you need to add an additional mouth, for example,if your character is eating their cheeks may need to bulge out a little etc. Here they are in on the character

It's standard practise before you begin to animate the mouths to create a dope sheet.

What is a dope sheet??

A dope sheet is where you pace out the voice overs words by how long the word is and how it is said phonetically. So we know which mouth shapes are needed and when to change them. Illustration below:

The page is divided into 24 frames per second. Below you write down the word or sentence that needs breaking up into mouth shapes. You figure out through timing your audio how long the word is said, how the word is broken up phonetically. Working from how many syllables the word has will help you. Then from this information you need to work out how many frames each mouth should be on screen for.

For this particular piece we drew and photographed the mouths and placed them on our character in the computer. We parented each mouth to our characters head so they moved with each other. We also did this with the eyebrows to give our character a wider range of expressions.

You can check out the film here and see the lip syncing in action.

https://steemit.com/film/@charlotteblacker/making-of-knitted-monster-movie-film-hand-knitted-multimedia-animation-promo-for-music-festival