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The Essentials of Lip Sync n 5
At its core, that’s really all that speech entails. When lip-syncing a character with a
plain circle for a mouth (which we’ll do in just a minute), the shapes in Figure 1.2 are all
that’s needed to create the illusion of speech.
Your reaction to this very short list of two
motions might be, “What about poses like F where
I bite my lip, or L where I roll up my tongue?”
Ignoring that kind of specificity is precisely the
point right now. We’re ignoring those highly spe-
cialized shapes and stripping the building blocks
down to what is absolutely necessary to be under-
stood visually. If these two ranges—from Open
to Closed and Wide to Narrow—are all you have
to draw on, you become creative with how to uti-
lize them. Things like F get pared back to “sort-of
closed.” When you animate this way and stop the animation on the frame where the “sort
of closed” is standing in for an F, it is easy to say, “That’s not an F!” But in motion, you
hardly notice the lack of the specific shape—and motion is what I’m really talking about
here. You should be less concerned with the individual frames and more concerned with
the motion and the impression that it creates. For most animators, there is a strong instinct
to add more and more complexity too early in the lip-sync process, but too much detail in
the sync can actually detract from the acting.
Animating lip sync is all illusion. What would really be happening isn’t nearly as rele-
vant as the impression of what is happening. How about M? You may be thinking, “I need
to roll my lips in together to say M, and I can’t do that with a wide-narrow-mouth-thing-
amajig.” Sure you can, or at least you can give the impression in motion that the lips are
rolled in—just close the mouth all the way—and that’s usually going to be good enough.
When you get the lip sync good enough to create an impression of speech and then focus
your energies on the acting, others will also focus on the acting, which is precisely what
you want them to do.
Analyzing the Right Things
Let me take you on a small real-world tutorial of what is and what is not important in
speech.
Animators have a tendency to slow things down to a super-slow-mo or frame-by-
frame level and analyze in excruciating detail what happens so as to re-create it. This
is not necessarily a bad thing, but here’s an example of how that can break down as a
method: Look in the mirror, and then slowly and deliberately overenunciate the word
pebble: PEH-BULL. You’re trying to see exactly what happens with your face. Watch all
the details of what your lips are doing: the little puff in your cheeks after the B; the way
Figure 1.2
A circular spline
mouth in the same
four basic poses
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