hello everyone! what's up?
yes yes I'm alive and well, calm down.
just working hard on other projects. Pretty cool stuff I hope you all get to hear about very soon.
In the meanwhile I've been asked by you many times about my animation process
and got various requests to make a making of video.
so I thought I'd grace you all with making a little making of video!
How do you like that??
well too bad I'm starting now.
So today I'm going to talk about how I do my lip-syncing,
as it looks like a popular request.
let me know if you want to see more making of videos in the comments
or just tell me how your day has been! I'm easy.
ANYWAY,
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wait till the end of this video
so let's get started
so okay.
as you might or might not know , I make cut-out animation.
And to o do so I work with Adobe animate.
A-dobe?
Am I saying that right?
Anyway some of you might know it as Flash!
I like using this older version for no good reason other than I'm too lazy to install the newer version.
But honestly it's basically the same so this tutorial is good for all.
As you can see here these are my lovely characters from my hit video "frozen is the new black"
If you haven't watched it yet shame on you!
But for sake it's available watch on my channel and I'll add a link in the video description.
So one of things you can notice about these characters other than being hella cute
is that despite sharing obvious art style similarities
They each have distinctive characteristics to separate them from the rest.
for the sake of this video let's focus on their mouths.
while I use a similar template for the mouth, something I'll talk about a little later,
I make sure to keep it within their character style
it's not a must but it helps define the character more
since in my case their eyes are always little dots so I can't really use them to convey character
let's take Ariel, a personal favorite, and see how she's built.
let's double click on our character symbol.
As you can see this is a cutout puppet character so she's separated to different symbols representing each body limb
you can see them separated into different key frames in the layers in the timeline
as well let's take a look inside her head.
Same deal! different layers are different face parts.
Mouth... eye.... brow
But we're here to talk about that mouth
Before we can lip-synch we need, well. lips.
How many do we need? Which ones do we create?
it's flexible but here is my personal system
So this is my basic template that I use for most of my animated videos
A little mini chart divided into two columns,
one has various vowels and consonants to create speech patterns
And the other is is moods
we got actions for A, M O, L, F...
This specific mouth can work for different actions like Shh, T, G, J, G, Ch, and even K and G.
it's pretty versatile and I found it to work just fine.
And over here in exile is my discontinued "TH"
I hardly use it anymore since i didn't like the way it looked in my videos,
Nowadays I just use this magic mouth instead.
it works just as well.
Over at the column of moods we have happy, Neutral, and sad.
Happy A, Neutral A, Sad A
Happy M, Neural M,
And to me the neutral M works as fine for bad mood as well most of the time so I use it there too.
Same goes for O and so on
The point of creating the mouths or lips is to make it work for your personal needs
the rules aren't really set in stone
when you watch different animated videos, shows and movies you can see that there are many ways to create your slate
for example as you can see here in my stranger things Christmas video
The characters never show teeth or tongue when they speak.
because the classical animated peanuts look exactly like that
it still works
the key is to make it communicative enough so the audience will understand
what you're trying to communicate and create a personal style
so do yourselves a favor and have a basic mouth template you always use.
Not only will it keep a constant style but it'll make your lives so much easier
I use these mouths for most of my characters but with different little changes.
This is Ariel's mouth but if I wanted her to go easy on the lip gloss...
there we go.
now I can use the smile for a lot of other characters too
now we're ready to lip sync! almost.
let's talk about of very useful tool that saved my sanity and how to use it.
would you look at that magnificent bastard
containing all my lips in an easy-to-use little tool.
just check out what happens when I press on Ariel's mouth and browse the caddy.
I know! so cool!
This is key frame caddy,
and seriously if you use adobe animate you NEED this plugin.
You can find it online and even though I got it a thousand years ago
I remember it being relatively easy to install.
So i'm betting it still is.
So how do bring your mouths into frame caddy?
well first you make sure that all your lip symbols are neatly sorted in your library
my living room might be a mess but my flash library? seamless
so we'll start by creating a few empty key frames
and place each lip symbol on each one of them
we're going to use the onion skin down here
because when you do this you should make sure the symbols are placed on the same spot
as much as you can
you should place ALL of the symbols on different key frames of course
but for the sake of this video example this amount is enough for us
let's cut all of these for future paste and create a different symbol
l in which we will contain all the mouths
doesn'tmatter what it has inside right now we're going to get inside the symbol and erase it
now let's paste
Here are out mouths!
let's double click out of the symbol
and as you can see we need to
change the looping option to single frames so it won't play the entire sequence all the time
now we open the keyframe caddy
in my case it's under window > other panels it might be different in your animate software
we click on our main mouth symbol
press load thumbnails
and voila! it got ourselves an amazing helpful tool
yes! we are ready.
you made it!
it you're about to lip-sync.
buckle up because this is the real deal and it. takes. some. time.
so here is Ariel again waiting to be synced
let's see the final product before getting into it.
Ariel: "Oh it's just like the castle you've always dreamed of!"
Okay let's see how that looks inside
double-click on the symbol you can see the animation of the different limbs here.
Ariel: "Oh it's just like the castle you've always dreamed of!"
double-click again on her head let's see inside
You can see the mouth layer with all those little keyframes
Ariel: "Oh it's just like the castle you've always dreamed of!"
When you go over to the time line slowly you can see each keyframe has a different mouth movement
let's go over how I did that
so like I showed you earlier we open keyframe Caddy
before we load the mouths into the Caddy a small mention as for sound in the timeline
you can see I opened a sound layer with my edited video sound already in it.
what i did it is upload the soundtrack to the software library and
drag it into the workspace while staying on the chosen music layer and it's there!
so let's get started
Ariel: "Oh it's just like the castle you've always dreamed of!"
To make things easier let's lock every other layer but the mouth layer.
it's here where we create the lip-sync
let's load the Caddy
Now our job is to listen to what she says and choose the mouth movement accordingly.
so our first sounds is an O
so we'll choose the O sound movement.
Ariel is pretty happy here so we'll go with a happy mouth of course
As you drag the timeline and listen
You replace those mouth symbols accordingly
T should go in here now...
The J forms into J so we'll keep the same symbol since it sounds familiar.
our next sounds is ah so we'll choose a happy A symbol and so on
basically when you lip-synch according to sound you should perk up those ears and follow your gut feeling.
There aren't really specific rules here as long as the character seems to align with the soundtrack
the most important thing is to communicate to the audience that this is the character talking
basically witchcraft.
so as long as you manage to keep that illusion, the number of mouths and how you place them don't matter all that much
if you convince everyone your character is real you're golden
alright let's play the video and see how we did with the basic syncing.
Ariel: "Oh it's just like the castle you've always dreamed of!"
looks good! but I think I'll drag all the animation one frame backwards
Ariel: "Oh it's just like the castle you've always dreamed of!"
Yeah! feels a little better.
so you might have noticed this kind of lip-synching looks a little different than my usual lip-syncing
that's because there's a very specific way I style my lip-syncing
so let's talk a little bit about what that means and what that might mean for you
this is what my final timeline looks like
let's look back at our basic animation from the previous page and play that versus the final one
Ariel: "Oh it's just like the castle you've always dreamed of!"
You can tell second one is way smoother and less staccato-y in movement
I do that by using motion tweens and add more keyframes with subtle animation changes of the mouths
let's see an example
the sound transitions here from O to U so I'll make another keyframe to resize the mouth and make an U shape.
Then I create a classic tween between the keyframes
I like adding a little ease out to give some flavor
much smoother now
Eee sound
Lets add one keyframe here and change up the mouth in the same way.
the "Tuh" here transitions to "Guh"
so we'll give it a nice long motion tween between keyframes
That's nice.
some movements don't require such stylizing, some do.
it's really a matter of flavour and feeling the animation
I use this method all throughout my lip synching process till it reaches this outcome
Yeah of a hassle but I like how it looks and honestly it's my favorite part of animating
my styling aligns accordingly if the character has more complex facial features
for example if you look at this character newt from fantastic beasts
Eddie Redmayne has a very specific look that centers around his mouth area so
you can see in addition to his mouth I've also created this shadow and this
chin to help identify the character better
unfortunately it sort of also triples the lip-syncing job but it's a living!
let's let newt speak so you can see his movements
Newt Scamander: “I’m so happy I could make it back to new york for christmas”
now let's hide all the layers but the chin so you can see how it moves when he speaks
to New York for Christmas now let's hear the same with the cheek shadow
Newt Scamander: “I’m so happy I could make it back to new york for christmas”
yup. But you respect me a lot more now huh!
let's see another example with Tony Stark
Tony Stark: “Ok buddy. Where am I, who are you, and what’s going on?”
Tony has the case of the facial hair.
so I made a whole other symbol for his little chin beard and one for his mustache
see what happens when I hide everything but the mustache
Tony Stark: “Ok buddy. Where am I, who are you, and what’s going on?”
since the top of the mustache can never move I don't move it rather than resize it according to how the mouth below changes
the main thing to remember about the stylizing part is that really
it's where your own personal style shines you can choose to have simple
mouth movements broad mouth movements have the chin move not have the chin move
it's really your playground to play in and add a personal flavour to
I wanted to show you how I establish my style so you can either take an example
from it or disregard it completely. basically have fun with it!
So i hope this tutorial taught you something new gave you some inspiration
or just quenched your thirst for hearing my lovely voice and my weird accent.
if watching this video inspired you to learn more about how the animation process works
Skillshare has a ton of animated classes for you to explore, whether you're a pro
like me and four-time oscar-winning bong joon-ho or just a beginner
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So you can explore your own creativity
I recommend "simple character lip-sync" by Fraser Davidson
it's a quick paced 9 lesson class that is just a bit over an
hour altogether this class will walk you through the entire process of making an
animated character talk using illustrator and after effects.
in this class you'll actually create your own character and be able to upload and share it with other students to get feedback
also, check out the teachers other class where he breaks down simple character
animation so by the end of them both you can have your own walking talking
animated character
thanks for watching!