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Lip syncing?

By Neo_Crisis | Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 9:28am
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:D 2D Animation FOREVER:D

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The Animation Cafe

Hi I'm some what new to animation, and I want to know how do traditional animators (pencil and paper animation :) )lip sync their animation (techniques and etc), It seems like it's hard to do (for a newbie like me,anyway) Thanks :)

Neo_Crisis's picture
:D 2D Animation FOREVER:D

Jabberwocky's picture
Submitted by Jabberwocky on

Hi Neo-Crisi. You're from Germany, too, aren't you?
What you rpimarily need for lip-synch is a breakdown chart of the sound file you're going to animate. On it, there's an indication for every sound produced by a character in every single frame of the (usually) 24 frames per second you animate. You can use freeware software like Monkey Jam to create your own breakdown charts. Some people use Magpie to get automatically generated breakdown charts, but from what I've heard the system isn't entirely foolproof. Doing it by hand may take longer but the result is usually more accurate.
Once they've got their breakdown chart, many professional animators thumbnail ruff sketches to loosely determine which poses get across what is said best. After that, timing is applied based on the information from the breakdown chart. Then the scene gets animated, cleaned and inbetweened.

Neo_Crisis's picture
Submitted by Neo_Crisis on

Thanks, Jabberwocky, and no I'm not from Germany, lol.

:D 2D Animation FOREVER:D

Oberyn's picture
Submitted by Oberyn on

As a supplement to the Jabberwocky's good advice, I recommend the Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams. It's the only animation technique book I've ever needed.

It covers typical mouth positions for their repsective phonemes using illustrated examples.

kentbraun's picture
Submitted by kentbraun on

Load your sound track into the demo version of DigiCel FlipBook. Then you can scrub through the scene and write the letters for the mouth positions you want into the frames where they belong. There's a watermark in the demo version but for lip sync you could work around it or buy the light version for $99 and use it for animation too.

You can download it at www.digicelinc.com.

Neo_Crisis's picture
Submitted by Neo_Crisis on

Ok, thanks guys. :) I will check out that book.

:D 2D Animation FOREVER:D

Pooryorik's picture
Submitted by Pooryorik on

Hey, Neo,

Here's the link to a thread I started a while back:

forums.awn.com/showthread.php?t=3758

There are some really good tips here for how to get started with mouth charts. You might find the information helpful.

Neo_Crisis's picture
Submitted by Neo_Crisis on

Thanks for the link,a very helpful thread. :)

:D 2D Animation FOREVER:D

wontobe's picture
Submitted by wontobe on

Hi Neo_Crisis, you are going to get a list of books from some of the people hear. If you have a web site, you should post it so we can see what work you have done so for.

Jabberwocky's picture
Submitted by Jabberwocky on

Another thing: it sometimes helps to playback sound delayed by approximately two or three frames. The human brain is capable of processing audio information faster than visual information. Giving it even that fraction of a second to adjust to the visual information first can make a scene more easily accessible as a whole.