Lip Syncing

I always have some sort of art project going on haha and lately I’ve been trying to figure out frame-by-frame animation and syncing audio to the animation. Hm…this may take some time.

I watched a video on Youtube saying that a way to understand mouth motions is to rest your chin on your fist with your elbow on a table or some other hard surface and just talk normally (preferably speaking the lines you want your character to say) and feel when your mouth motions push against your chin to know when to have the mouth wide when you’re animating your character to speak. It’s important to know because theres a misconception about animation that says you open your mouth wide when you talk so that’s how people animate their characters.

Another technique I’ve heard was placing your finger on the corners of your mouth and feel when your mouth goes wide and when it goes narrow. These exercises just help you understand the motions of the mouth as you speak so that the animation flows.

Also, apparently our mouths forms the words before we actually speak…so placing the audio about 5 frames ahead of the animation. I’ve read that animations typically are about 1,440 frames per minute…I’m working on an animation that is about 2 and a half minutes long so I’m looking at about 3600 frames…ugh..but I”m sure the end result will be worth it! haha

Wish me luck! And have fun trying out your own lip syncing animations! =)

Interactive Story in Flash

So as a farewell to my graphic design class, we had to make one last project in Flash. Everyone did simple animations – one girl had a guy walk through a corn field during a sunset, another did a flower blossoming, and another had a bunny get hit by a truck – I, however, didn’t get the “simplicity” memo and had to go all out with a near 5000 frame animation….

Oh! What headaches I got from this project! I got stressed at times that I thought I wouldn’t get my project done and that cause my headaches. But it’s done and my teacher seemed like a little kid playing with my animation hahaha.

So I want to share my project with everyone! I uploaded it to deviantART which you can find here but I’m going to insert it into this post too haha. Enjoy and let me know what you think! =)

p.s. I know the words go by kinda fast haha sorry about that…

story

..um I thought I would be able to insert the animation directly into the post, but instead WordPress put this link here and if you click on it, you can see the animation bigger and better! Haha I like it so I’m gonna leave it like that….enjoy!!!!