Mouth Shapes

Mouth shapes for an animation aside from lip-sync usually have to do with acting choices. So we’ll mostly be focusing on exertion, AKA breathing and clenching teeth and emotion. For the most part, both Abi and Tabi should probably have their teeth clenched as they run. Tabi could be smiling as Abi is frowning.

However, once each one starts doing anything like jumping or recovering, they should take a moment to look slightly tired, which includes taking a deep breath through their mouth. For that we’ll want to have the mouth open in a shape that’s easy to breathe with, such as an O shape. The mouth rig has an easy to use phoning control that we’ll also go over in the lipsync video.

We can use this for a simple O shape. Make sure that it isn’t too long vertically so it feels relaxed. If you want to show some more visible frustration, clenched teeth with the lips raised accomplishes this very well. Raising the lips to bare the teeth can be a mouth shape you can use when Abi gets a bit more stressed that her target is getting away for example. You can do this with the phoneme shape control as well, or the bones on our lips. There’s also a jaw bone if you want to finesse the opening of the mouth yourself. For the most part, this process should be pretty straightforward. Like any acting shot, you want to reference your own reactions to what they’re doing in the shot. For here you want to see what kind of mouse shapes you would do in that situation and try to mimic that. For those animators who are more comfortable with acting, you will also have more success getting into character and having more accurate reference.

In the next video, we’ll be going over lip-sync which will be a more complex version of mouth animation.