Lip Sync - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 218

Scrub over the fi rst part of the audio, back and
forth, so that you can identify the sound that is
being made. When you've fi gured out the correct
mouth shape to begin with according to the ani-
mation controls you've developed, place the cur-
rent frame marker at the very beginning of the
sound (not the audio strip, but the sound itself ).

Every time you use a mouth control, you will
have to set at least three keys. The fi rst key will
be in the “closed” or “off ” position. The second
key will be in the middle of the voice sound
that control represents, in the “on” position.
Remember that the control does not have to be
the whole way “on.” You will have to use your
judgment regarding the exact sound of the audio
clip, the volume of the voice, and the emotional
state of the character at the time. The third and
fi nal key will be a return to the “off ” position.

Figure 12.6 Baseline keys are set for all mouth controls

Another good guideline is to begin the mouth
movement two frames before that bit of sound
actually starts. This gives a bit of anticipation to
the action, and, as humans preform words before
the sound actually comes out of their mouths, it
is more in line with reality.

Take a look at the key set for the mouth move-
ments of the line of dialog introduced earlier
(Figure 12.7). Notice that the actual sequence of
mouth keys are, overlapping, o-th-a-oo-a-r . If
you key every single letter in the script, you will
produce an animation that is extremely overacted.
It will look like your character is wildly enunci-
ating every single syllable to pass an English as a
second language test. Instead, listen carefully to
the dialog as spoken. Try to hear it not as words
but as the actual raw sounds. When we speak,
our mouths actually take a lot of shortcuts, and it
will benefi t your animation to take note of it.

a

a

o

oo

th

r

While lip syncing would benefi t from a real-
time preview played with the audio in place, this Figure 12.7 The keys for “Oh there you are”