Well, maybe it should be called - basic lipsync looking good and done fast. All very juicy stuff, concerning, I think, the most important (and basic) aspects of lipsync.
First of all, the bulk of lipsync is in opening the mouth on the main beats. Just use your own mouth to discover what those are - for example, in the word a-ni-ma-tion we don't normally open the mouth on every syllable, we open it only twice: 1 on ani and 2 on mation. I'm talking about the main mouth movements - if you open and close the mouth on every syllable, you get a machine gun lipsync that looks horrible, like that resulting from automated lipsync.
Second important thing would be to close the mouth fully only on Ms, Ps, and Bs. And you have to close it, and keep it closed for at least 2-3 frames, or your lipsync will look off and floaty. So in our example: ani-mation we open & close, keep it tight on M and open & close again.
Step 1 and 2 would be enough to get you basic lipsync that looks OK and very readable on a simple character. It's really important that you get the mouth opening and closing right, and time this really really correctly. These are the main pillars of lipsync, everything else... you simply build around them. If the pillars are timed incorrectly, if they don't hit the main syllables properly, you can polish your lipsync forever, it will be off.
Third important thing is: OOs and EEs. After you get the main pillars right, add in some OO or EE wherever necessary, but keep these relative!! By relative I mean - their values should be relative to their surroundings. An OO doesn't have to go all the way down to a full OO to feel an OO. If it follows an O shape, yes, it should go more extreme than that O. But if it follows an EE shape, simply reducing some of that EE can be enough to make it feel like an OO. Take our example - animation - the first mouth movement is ani, we slide from a default position (for the sake of simplicity we'll start from the default mouth) into a little bit of EE, and we go back. We fully close the mouth, we might even go a little bit more towards OO during the close, and then, as we open again on mation, we do the same slide into a little bit of EE ad back again as we close the mouth. Now this little bit could be just a little bit, or maybe a bit more, it's up to you to decide what looks good, and oh yeah, it all comes down to the soundtrack - whether the voice is calm or agitated, etc, that will influence the look of that mouth significantly. You could speak on a side, barely moving the mouth, you could move the mouth left to right during speech, you could exaggerate or reduce intensity, shapes, etc. All lipsync comes on top of facial expressions anyway!! This means it's a good idea (see what Shawn Kelly says in an older post you can read here) to animate lipsync last.
Less important, but easy to do and very very cool is to keep the jaws loose: move the jaws left and right along with the main mouth openings - if you track the tip of your character's beard you should normally get nice round curves and figure 8s. In our example, on ani and mation we could have 2 ovals, one for each mouth opening, or maybe one figure 8 starting at ani and ending at the end of mation. Keep this jaw movement more or less subtle, and maybe only have larger jaw movement on the main shot accents for example. Like: "WOW, this is pretty cool looking animation..." could have one big mouth accent on "WOW", of course... and then all the rest is kept subtle, maybe with some intensity on the word "animation", especially on the second beat - "mation" (while keeping "mation" though... say... half the intensity of "WOW").
There are other things involved in lipsync, obviously, but I consider them to be details - as you get in detail... you start being concerned with more exact mouth shapes, with Fs and Vs and Ts and Ls, and whether you want to show any tongue movement or not... (normally you should, at least on Ls, Ts and THs).
Finally, as a conclusion - if you only have one controller (!) to animate lipsync, that controller should be able to open & close the mouth on the vertical, and pose the mouth from OO to EE on the horizontal. With only one controller you can get decent simple lipsync that's done fast and looks natural.
Comments
Head tilting is a major part of an appealing pose. That's what I think. Of course, you don't tilt your head aggressively all the time!! Just a little bit, or maybe... a little more than just a little bit... you can find tilts in pretty much any pose. I'm just observing here, this is not a recipe. I don't usually like what comes out when animators follow too many recipes instead of focusing on real performance/acting. This cartoony, graphic principle, goes actually hand in hand with a real world phenomenon - we balance our heads and bodies all the time. A twist of one body part can generate another twist of another body part, in either the same or opposite direction. Balance is achieved through opposites though. Look at this guy (this and the 7 following images... not containing rats... are taken from the excelent movie - Little Miss Sunshine): His head seems to want to stay straight while the body twists, creating an arc, like an inverted C shape. This is what it seems at first glance, but we'll be back with this example in just a sec. Because it's actually not the need of the head to stay straight that we're examining here, it's the contrary. The head does need to stay straight so it can get a clear picture and function in optimal conditions. But its "straightness" is not that... straight all the time. The head needs to stay straight, but it often finds itself doing otherwise. OK, so from here on I'm only talking about tilts. Tilts occur in so many cases that's just ridiculous... but most of them are fairly subtle. It's almost like saying - the head is straight... but in effect it's not. I've given examples of more extreme tilts in this post though, just to emphasize the fantastic appeal of head tilts. Oh, and I'll only show left-right tilts, which I consider more special and appealing (backward-forward tilts are pretty basic, and everybody is using them all the time - well, OK, one thing about backward-forward tilts - I love how the Muppets keep shaking their heads all the time, now that's a brilliant caricature of real head movement, typical for the puppets-animation medium, but just... unique in that specific way it appears in the Muppets). Notice how both characters are tilted towards their right. Yeah, I'm looking. And guess what. I can tilt left too... From the same shot as the first image - notice the line of action has changed from an inverted C to a C shape, the head tilting with the entire body from right to left (I always refer to the character's left and right). Look at us tilting an twisting... aren't we cute? (Notice how their bodies are tilted towards each other, while their heads are tilted in parallel, towards their right) OK, if you think this isn't such a big deal, let's look at real world examples, where you'll see that tilting heads are actually really going wild (it's weird that a cartoon doesn't use tilting more than real life... Could it be because the artist's eye has the tendency to straighten up and smooth out things...?) And then how they keep tilting from left to right And btw, the kid in yellow is not talking, and he's kind'a stiff and ignoring the rest of the table. Yet... he does change his pose quite a bit. And he tilts with (or against) the rest of the group, hihi. They're like trees swaying in the wind... Back to the guy in blue, and his family. Notice the variety of tilts :D OK, and now look at the blue guy again: Is his head tilted or is it his body? Well, in the above image, his head is almost straight, while the body is tilted. But actually as he stands up and walks, we see that his head keeps a similar angle with the body, and becomes tilted. Hihi. It's part of his current attitude. And here... the whole gang seems to want to be tilting right (maybe it's the road...?). Yeah, except for the guy in white who's so stiff (he's got his reasons allright) - so maybe it's not the road... Let's go and see more tilting examples. (This and all the following images are copied from various internet sources, if anybody is offended, please let me know and I'll take them out. Oh, and please don't sue me, I'm one o'them good guys...) Maybe it's their job... Maybe they're trying to impress... or to relax... Kids do it a lot... all the time... Even at an early age... So why shouldn't divas do it?? They know it's sexy and appealing. Especially women! OK, now maybe someone's trying a bit too hard here... look how tilted this head is... craaaaaazy :D So women I guess were the first to realize the head tilt looks really good on a resume... And got to real extremes... While men were soon to follow... slightly more serious... Tilting your head is good for your health too... ...aaand in case you need to scratch like a monkey... now that's some tilt! Dogs do it... the love doing it! And other animals too (even if it's sometimes a disease - yeah, poor fella', he's actually ill, looks like some animals have this disease that's called... head tilt, weird, huh?) Some people do it sometimes in pairs... It's being done successfully in other countries as well... You wouldn't think this is much of a tilt, now, would you...? ...but look again (actually this pencil is a little off, and the tilt is slightly more pronounced). Well, OK, finally, if you don't know how to do it (hihihi), here's a scheme... Edit: that underlines this clearly (although I think he meant "unless the pose calls for a straight... line of action" or something like that). Of course, there'll be times when you need a pose to be rather straight, uptight, but that should have a solid reason in the acting context. For natural, live, appealing poses, lean, twist, bend, tilt... just don't overdo it, don't completely mutilate the character :D The hardest thing in a pose is balance. But it's also probably the most beautiful. OK, two words basically - demo reel. Could be one word - demoreel. :D Click on the image below to see the high quality (16 MB) reel. Cleaned up the animation I worked on this summer and here it is, my first demo reel. I could say it's sort of... the result of my "first semester of animation". Except that I'm not in school :). I have now... some 15 months of animation experience.... maybe more, counting the 3 years of learning 3D. My first bouncing ball happened... almost 3 years ago (btw, that was the first serious animation I've ever done, and I mean 'serious' because I tried to analyse the real thing and animate a real golf ball, giving myself those restrictions - the real weight and solidity of the ball, the real hardness of the floor, which was my carpet...etc. That's when I started thinking about animation more seriously, how I would animate a blink, a head turn, how these things really happen in real life...), but I have spent more time learning 3D, and not really focusing on animation. Last year I started doing walks and all kinds of exercises, and this summer, once my 3D toy, Cousteau, was done, I really started animating and spent the whole summer doing this, and learning animation. I feel like I've learned a lot this summer, and that I'm just scratching the surface, and animation is aaaaaaawesome :D. Anyway, click on the image below if you have less bandwith and can only afford to see a smaller sized (3MB) reel. Work done, although I'm not too happy with it, and I missed the deadline for the 10 second animation competition. Bugger. Eh. Life goes on, and I'll compete some other time, with something nicer;) I went through a few tutorials for Renderman for Maya (RfM) last night and I found out some new, really cool stuff. Among other things I also managed to finally (!) understand how DOF works! I also found out the following supercool thingzzz: Mostly obscure right now, because there is no face and fingers animation, so no expression. The action at the end looks even more confusing, when there's no more sound, it almost looks like a mistake. But if you compare this to the 2D blocking you'll find out what happens. Click to see (840k): The 2D blocking, for comparison (720k): Just started working on a new acting shot today. The acting idea came to me a few days ago though. This is going to be (when it's finished) my first ever entry in the 10 second animation competition. Here's a handdrawn breakdown of the shot with this month's soundfile. Now I'm going into Motion Builder and start setting keys, which means I'll break down things even further, into much more detail, as I set keys. (Tip: if you build one key from the other, the computer gives you more or less clean inbetweening, with much less work to do - of course, it's a matter of how the rig works as well. I learned this recently from the Jason Schleifer Ask the Pro session on CgChar) Anyway, here's the video (720k): Also, here's a rough breakdown of an earlier shot I wanted to animate for the 10 second club, but didn't have the guts to go beyond the breakdown at that time :D It's the "fezzik" shot from a few months ago. Check it out (860k): |
About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
February 2022
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