Despite recording my vocal track a number of times, they all ended up sounding pretty much identical. Rather than waste more time developing my non existent voice acting skills, I chose to use the recording of the lyrics that I had used in my animatic, as this fitted in well with my planned timings.
Although the 'Acting for Animators' seminar we had a few weeks ago emphasised the importance of the body animation over facial animation, I chose to do the lip sync animation first. I felt that it would be easier to animate the mouth first, without the face moving, rather than changing the camera angle to track the face for every frame.
Once again, I began by breaking the recording down frame by frame to create a dope sheet. There are quite a few 'L' sounds in the lyrics, which are difficult to achieve with Moom, as he doesn't have a tongue (a significant indicator of the 'L' phoneme). 'Th' sounds also posed the same problem. I just had to try my best to make the mouth shapes recognisable without a tongue, or, indeed, many teeth.
Although the 'Acting for Animators' seminar we had a few weeks ago emphasised the importance of the body animation over facial animation, I chose to do the lip sync animation first. I felt that it would be easier to animate the mouth first, without the face moving, rather than changing the camera angle to track the face for every frame.
Once again, I began by breaking the recording down frame by frame to create a dope sheet. There are quite a few 'L' sounds in the lyrics, which are difficult to achieve with Moom, as he doesn't have a tongue (a significant indicator of the 'L' phoneme). 'Th' sounds also posed the same problem. I just had to try my best to make the mouth shapes recognisable without a tongue, or, indeed, many teeth.
I followed the dope sheet quite closely at first, but on playing the animation back, I could see that some poses were not right and need alteration. These were primarily the 'T' sounds, as I had assigned them the 'Th' phoneme on the dope sheet (as there was no 'T' phoneme in the guide given). However, when checking in a mirror, I could see that a hard 'T results in a mouth shape closer to the C D G K N R S Y Z phoneme.
I also spoke quite quickly in my voice recording, meaning that the animation looks quite busy, as the mouth shapes change quite drastically between some frames. Neither did I enunciate as clearly as Mel Gibson (in the Braveheart clip which I previously animated to), which meant there were quite a few instances where I had to choose between two sounds which happened in the same frame. Thanks to my accent, there were also times where I had to substitute phonemes; for example, some of my 'A's sounded more like 'U's once the lyrics were broken down.
Despite these minor niggles, I do enjoy lip sync animating, and would like the opportunity to animate a more dexterous mouth than Moom's; one with greater freedom and control, as I would have loved to be able to curl the upper lip or bare teeth for some phoneme shapes, which Moom's face just cannot do.
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