Lip Sync
This week’s lecture introduced the workflow for lip sync: Blocking → Blocking Plus → Polishing. In blocking, we focus on clear key poses (including the facial expression), then add breakdown keys and major mouth shapes/timing, and finally polish by connecting mouth shapes smoothly.
A main focus was jaw opening (“muppet mouth” approach): identify the accents in the sentence, avoid linear transitions, and simplify shapes while syncing to the audio (often working on twos).
We also covered phonemes and mouth corner control: “Oo/U” corners in, “Eh/Ee” corners out, sealing corners for clarity, and building clear shapes for M/B/P and V/F. Mouth shapes should hold long enough to read (at least a couple of frames), and we should animate the sounds, not the words, layering mouth shapes on top of the existing facial expression.
For polish, we discussed adding tongue shapes for TH / T / D / L, subtle lower-face squash/stretch with big jaw motion, and small breathing details. The key reminder was to go through the lip sync frame by frame to check clarity and timing.