The science of lip-syncing
It’s time for the best part of this exercise: animating Rain’s mouth. This will make her talk (so to speak).
As with walking, talking is one of those things we see people do every day. As I’ve mentioned before, this makes it harder to animate, not easier! It will help, then, to begin by deconstructing what it is that our mouths are doing while we’re talking.
Phonetics for animators
Fortunately, effective lip-syncing does not require a complete lesson in phonetics. We needn’t learn how to speak – just how the act of speaking looks to an observer.
The following are essential elements of speech that we should know – what I’ll call mouth poses. When performed in sequence, these positions of the jaw, lips, teeth, and tongue are how we speak, and also how we make a character appear to speak. Most words – even short ones – are comprised of multiple mouth poses, so these poses will...
