Production - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 261

and the lower jaw managed 'Ms' and 'Vs. One shape that is always hard to make is a pursed
and puckered 'P' shape. This can be done using replacement mouth shapes (as with Jack
Skellington, in The Nightmare before Christmas ) or by replacing the mouth structure, but with
Toad such a large expanse of mouth made any form of replacement dii cult. But you i nd a way
to convince the audience that the character is doing accurate lip-sync, and this is about not
animating every tremble of the mouth. Should an actor say 'Mississippi, there are seven mouth
shapes. Watch this on a i lm and you would probably see a blurred mouth in most of the frames
as the jaw and lips raced from one shape to another. With stop motion we do not usually have
the luxury of blurred frames, and showing a puppet mouthing every syllable would give a
distracting and very l appy action. There is no need to animate the shape exactly as written
on the bar sheet, but it's important to listen to the overall shape of the word, and to some
extent, you need to be anticipating the shape of the next sound. With so many consonants in
' Mississippi' there are not enough frames to shut the mouth then open it again wide for the
vowels, but you can give the suggestion that the mouth is shutting and opening. The word
'oboe' has two big O shapes with a tight closed B in the middle. Both Os are so wide and the B
is so brief that I'd only close the mouth a fraction before opening it again. Closing it all the way
would look overenunciated. Most puppets have neither teeth nor a tongue, both of which are
vital for speech, making exact reproductions of mouth shapes somewhat futile. Thinking of the
character, the rhythm, the volume and the geography is far more important.
Mouth shapes: not just an open and shut case - Jo Cameron Brown,
dialect coach
The way a character sounds helps to tell the story of who they are. The shape of the mouth matching the
voice-over gives the character authenticity, believability and above all character. Try this: stretch your
mouth into a letterbox shape: 'eeeeee' what characteristic does that expression convey … hesitancy,
apology, surprised resignation? Now bring the lips forward into an 'oooooo': How does that feel? Vowels
tend to convey emotion: 'oooooo', 'aaahhh', 'aaww', 'heeeeh'. They are made by the tongue position in
the mouth and while no lip movement is required to make a vowel, adding lip-rounding, stretching, jaw
dropping lends a character life, and humour. Consonants tend to make sense of these emotive vowels.
Try this: back to the letterbox mouth shape, teeth slightly apart and say 'A hard day's night'. Now have a
yawn, retain that open jaw and round space in the mouth and say 'A hard day's night'. You will have two
very different sounds. The fi rst near a Liverpool sound, the second nearer an RP English sound. Try the
oooo shape, lips forward, energy at the front of the mouth 'A hard day's night' now may be making the
journey up to Newcastle, or if those lips are softened into a pout our character takes on a French je ne sais
quoi ! Lip shapes can help identify a character, matching the accents and dialects of the voice-over, adding
emotion, background, humour. Even a single lip shape can defi ne a character: just consider Elvis' lip-curl.