Mouvs

Mouvs

I thought that I would write a little about things I try to remember when animating lip-synch. Now normally, and particularly if there is a phoneme library available, it is tempting to just dial in the correct shape for the sound and boom, you have a talking head. Now while this is perfectly fine and spiffy for many situations, we want to be able to make looking at our character as interesting and as expressive as possible, since a talking face is what the audience will be drawn to every time. The first thing we can do is to accent certain important phonemes, such as vowel sounds, making them bigger/smaller by manipulating the jaw and mouth. Immediately this will make things more interesting as the shapes favour some things over others, breaking up the parroty regularity of the jaw going up and down.

Another thing to try would be to find places to make the face assymetrical. Take a look at my really rubbish drawing of the two major face shapes in "what?". In the first set, the mouth goes into an 'oo', and then makes an 'oh' (as in "hot"). The jaw goes up, then down - fine, but pushing the jaw up and screen right, then down and left adds bags more character, particularly if the emotion is one of incomprehension. Clearly this is all dependent on the line, but the general rule can still be applied.
Also notice how I've sneakily complimented the mouth shape with eye squishiness and asymmetry. Compressing and popping out again adds a little punch!

When I've done all of this, the last thing I'll do is to go back over the line as a whole. First, I watch the corners of the mouth to see if it's too crazy, adjusting as necessary, and then go look for places where I can squash and stretch the whole face, (not just the mouth, but everything). A good little trick is to figure out the amount of squash/stretch as a fraction of how much the jaw moves up and down! Quick and easy, (particularly for us computer nee-urds), but it works! The amount is dictated by the style of the animation, but even a subtle amount can give realistic looking motion a bit of life and avoid the whole mask-like look.

My favourite piece of lip-synch is in "The Iron Giant" where Hogarth picks up the phone and delivers his greeting in monotone, as if he's said it a gazillion times before. He says something like, "Hughes residence, Hogarth speaking, who's calling please?", but the way in which the line is spoken is not in a way in which you would expect. Take the way he says "please" - the animator has totally got the mechanics of the delivery. Instead of your normal 'S' shape, and in keeping with Hogarth's reasonably glum attitude, the actor had kept his jaw stiff and the sound is being made by tightening the muscles below the lower lip and on the chin, making the escaping air whistle as it comes out over the top teeth. The shape is just perfect for the sound, and I thought that that was total genius. If you get a chance, have a looky and you'll know what I mean.