Lip Sync with Martin

Lip sinking is one of the most important things to learn in animation and there are around 9-11 main different mouth expressions used in dialogue, which can be split into vowels and consonants. Animating mouth movement is done by animating the the phonetics rather than the individual letter of that word, to get this wright you need to learn the phonetics of a word and even a group of wrods that would be spoken together.

The key thing to remember is that if you try and animate every single letter the mouth movements will be way to fast and it will end up looking weird. So animate vowels and only add punctuation shapes where necessary. The audio and be a couple of frames behind the animation but the animation can never be a couple of frames ahead because it'll be in-sync, and the shape of the mouth can form the sound of the word. 

After learning about this I wanted to have a quick go for myself even though I've already done some lip syncing in a 3D animation. One of are tutors gave us an after effects file with a shape that has different mouth shapes and we had to get a piece of audio and then try and lip sync to it using the different mouth shapes. My audio was from the 3D animation that I had already done lip syncing for, so it made this task just that little bit easier. 

I found this easy to do because it was just lining up mouth shapes to the audio so that it looks like it lip syncs. I feel like the hardest thing to lip sync will stop motion characters because you can't play the audio at the same time as the animation due to the fact that you're still modelling the characters lips to the sounds. I'd like to practice this further and develop my skills in this because I feel like I'm defiantly going to need this skill in the animation industry.