Lip Sync

You may have already noticed, but the audio that we provided also includes a quick piece of dialogue when Abi yells at Tabi during the fight scene. This times approximately with when she launches the first surprise attack. We’re going to do a quick pass of lip-sync for this line. The idea for lip-sync is pretty simple.

We have a phoneme control on the rig that gives you control of six different phonemes or mouth shapes. I call them the MPB, the E the O. The U the FV and the pucker mouth shapes. Additionally, there are two controls built into the scale of the master phoneme bone. Scaling the phoneme control larger along the Z axis lifts the center of both lips, and scaling along the Y axis curls the tongue into an L shape. With these it should be possible to animate the phrase “give it back!” Or any phrase with one bone.

As a general rule for lip-sync, I highly recommend trying to say and form these words for yourself as you animate to get a reference of what your mouth should look like for each sound. Having a mirror or a camera can also help so you can physically see the shape you’re making. Before we get started, I highly recommend turning on audio scrubbing in the timeline settings.

This will let you hear the audio while you scrub through the timeline, allowing you to time to lip sync to the voiceover perfectly. You can do this by pressing the playback dropdown and enabling audio scrubbing.

I’ll quickly walk you through my own thought process in case it helps. To start off, we’ll want to make the G sound, which is really just a slightly open E shape. Then we’ll want to do the V sound, which is part of the VF shape . From there we have the it sound, which is simply an open E and a closed E shape in quick succession.

Then a Bah shape, which is a tightly closed mouth using the MPB shape, which then leads to an explosive Ah sound for back. This is essentially an open mouth, like the O shape, but slightly wider. Then you would end with an open E shape for the CK and if you play it back, you should get “give it back.”

Anytime you do, lip-sync just reference your own mouth and you’ll do great. And if you can’t do that, find a friend or look online

in the next video, we’ll talk a bit more about effects and how they can sweeten your animation.