Lip Sync Lecture

There are around 9-11 main mouth expressions that are used in dialogue, and these can be broken up into both vowel and consonants. When creating a lip sync it's important to remember to animate the phonetics rather than each individual letter as the word would be wrote down. Instead, you need to study the phonetics of a word, or even how a group of words would be spoken together.

Examples of Lip Sync Charts

Some Golden Rules of lip syncing include:
- Animate vowel sounds
- Only add punctuation shapes where necessary. Too many will make the mouth movement seem un-natural and out of sync.
- You can be a couple of frames early your animation, but it will never work if the visuals are late.
- The shape of the mouth forms the sound.
- Exposure sheets are useful!

I wanted to quickly test my new lip sync knowledge as it is something I have not yet experimented with, as the opportunity has not arisen. I selected a sound clip from the audio for my responsive project (as it's the only audio I had with me at the time), and used Martin's prepared mouth shapes to try and create a lip sync.

Lip Sync Test

As a first try I don't think I did too bad. It was my first time using Hold Keyframes in After Effects too, and I'm so happy that I now know this exists as I can see this feature being very useful for future projects. Though I did have some issues that no one seemed to have the answer for; the mouth shapes were changing in between two keyframes that were exactly the same. With this being said I think the mouth movements look relatively accurate, and I would like to practice this further to see if I can improve this skill, as I definitely think I'm going to need it.