Here’s my lip sync rough assignment. I’ve got a couple notes on them I thought I’d share.
I tried on each vowel to make the mouth pop open. I don’t believe we slowly open and close our mouths so the frames are spaced out a lot. If i were to put inbetweens between the mouth shapes, It would have definitely slowed down the action and worse yet, make the animation not match the audio, completely ruining the point of the lip sync. When we talk, air is getting projected out of us to make the sound. I don’t believe I’ve seen someone speak evenly with a mouth that goes slowly. Even if someone is speaking slowly, the movement of the lips and mouth are spaced out a lot.
Speaking of lips and mouth, a good friend of mine made a nice point after observing the lip sync animations from years prior. She noticed that the upper jaw and teeth specifically on some projects didn’t move. This makes sense of course if you are doing an assignment where the goal is just to have lips, teeth and tongue moving. Why bother moving the upper row of teeth if a head was perfectly still? Well, a head doesn’t stay perfectly still. Still for sure, but there is still movement in the upper jaw regardless. Even if it is for a quick project such as this, you could chalk keeping something still up to either laziness on the part of some students (students who, understandably, also have a lot of other assignments and projects to worry about.) The teeth are framed by the lips so it’s important to remember that they will stick out if they are the only static image surrounded by something moving.
With a pop, I also made sure that the lips weren’t just returning to the same position. when we talk, our lips move all around but it might be difficult to remember that they move out as well. The lower lip sticks out the most whenever we make an “O” expression and they get flatter and pulled back whenever we make a grin. That said, They still wrap around the form of the mouth, so it’s important to make sure that volume is there. A good sense of volume is important even for something as simple as lips. where a single flat line could ruin an expression, something curved can make it feel more believable.
As for the last bit at the end, I though’t it would be neat to have a little more animation tacked on. I could end the lip sync there, but I believe there is a chance for a performance in anything you’re animating. I settled for this but my initial idea was to have a forked tongue. The eyes would fall out and the fork tongue would point to the eyes and towards someone off screen, a la V fingers pointing at your eyes then back to someone else menacingly.
That’s all for now.