Sound and Lip-Syncing
The visual component of a film or video – be it animated or live-action – is only half of what makes up the finished product. The other half is sound. What the audience hears is no less important than what they see, so I cringe whenever an animator treats the audio as an afterthought in their project; as if sound were just a supplemental sensory layer slapped onto a chiefly visual medium. If anything, it’s the other way around!
Whenever applicable, I insist on having a finished soundtrack and/or voiceover before I begin animating, either by obtaining it from the client, working with an audio engineer, or producing the audio myself. Audio is just that important for establishing the pace and timing of an animation, and nowhere is this clearer than in the task of lip-syncing – animating a character’s mouth to speak prerecorded lines.
By making Rain lip-sync in this chapter, we’ll accustom ourselves to using sound in...
