For study task four and five we had to choose a sound fragment, gathered by Mat. That fragment we then had to dissect and fill in a dope sheet. A dope sheet is a way to schematically write down what is going to happen at what frame, and how long that action will take. Usually dope sheets are way more difficult, but we got a simplified version since we only had to worry about the lip sync.
At first the dope sheet didn't look like this. It was scattered around on a few pages of a note bloc, probably in the bin now. Or even already recycled. Heh. Alright. I had quite a hard time trying to fit all the sounds into a rate of 12 frames a second because a lot of the sounds only hold for 1 frame. When actions last for such a short time I feel like it will go too fast. (That's why when I tried to animate my first lipsync which I started roughly a year ago, I tried to animate it in 2D on 24 frames per second. Real regrets here. It's still not finished)
A few tips I gathered over the time I'm studying I wanted to keep in mind while working on this task: never literally animate all the sounds that are in a word because you don't actually hear them. The way we move our mouths while talking is a smooth transition of movements, so you must try to convey such an illusion. Another tip I got is to never open a mouth twice on a word. Which is quite restricting. I reckon it depends on the words you're using, but on a regular basis you never fully close your lips while talking, so I'm guessing it refers to that.
I first wanted to not do more than necessary, i.e. only make the mouth move. It's what's in the task and I felt I already had enough stuff to do, I would only be wasting time doing too much work. While animating I already soon realised I was moving too much. It felt like the jaw was bobbing to much and way too fast. So I had to cut quite some movements to make the mouth move smoothly to the audio. After I finished it still felt a bit awkward. A bit too static. So then I decided in the end to add more movements to bring it a bit more to life.
I also exaggerated a few of the movements in the mouth by opening it a bit more here and there and tweaking some areas of the lips. I didn't give the animation of the head/eyes too much attention, but I feel with the animation it feels a bit more natural right now. The head tilt forwards near the end still feels a bit awkward but I couldn't really be bothered to change it right now for I feel I should give the main project more focus right now. I still want to try and animate another lipsync (probably 11secondclub from december. In november I put my main attention on practicing blocking poses and such. Because of BAF I didn't come around to animate a lip sync so in the end I didn't send it in. I'm not sure if I will participate in the december one as well for it'll probably be just a practice, but I'll see how it goes.)
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