Week 8 - Facial Animation and Lip Sync

 

Lip Syncing was an interesting thing to learn today. For most of the day, we followed a presentation learning the importance of lip-syncing. for instance, such as; several sounds that look the same would be called "visemes" and a sound that can distinguish a word would be "phonemes". We looked at a short video clip to understand how the jaw moved when speaking. For example, in a scene from The Crown we saw Princess Thatcher speaking, we focused on her jaw and established that the jaw doesn't have to move much when speaking. Interpreting this to animation we learnt about using audio in Maya and looking at volume waves which can help us consider animating vowels and fast extreme shapes. To help vocal performance, body language is also as important, this is because it reinforces the emotions of the characters and changes the way the dialogue is delivered. Thus blocking the keyframes would help in translating the facial acting and understanding the character first before unblocking. Afterwards, the Studio library engine was presented to us, which turned out to be very useful as it helps manipulate the character close to a pose that I wanted. 

After this, I created a quick short lip sync video following some of the tutorials and trying to do it through the skills that I learned today. Following the audio, it was hard to understand what it was saying, however having it translated it was then easy to discover what he was saying in each frame within Maya. I started block posing by moving his jaw up and down and then adding some rotation to create more emphasis on the character. Although this character is just a robot and not a human I was able to understand jaw movements and how helpful it could be to pronounce words. 

In conclusion, I was able to understand the importance of jaw movements and the difference between visemes and phonemes. What I would do next time is work on a different character for lip-syncing to broaden my experience and help for my final Project.