Lip Sync

This process and production session focused on how we can apply speech to an animated character. Learning how to go about this skill will be very helpful as most animations will have some kind of dialogue to give. The tasks involved filling in a x sheet, creating a character sheet and finally using these resources to put the animation together.

X Sheet

This sheet is used for breaking down dialogue into separate syllables and sounds so it is easy to apply the sound of the words to the characters mouth shape frame by frame. On the sheet there is frame numbers and next to that is space to write down the word, the sound of the word and then the mouth shape the character will make when making these sounds.

At first sight of these sheets my first thought was that this task was going to be complicated and confusing but like anything else when you start the task and get in to it, it is quite easy. The dialogue I chose was of a man saying "And now for something completely different." To fill the sheet in I had to listen to the dialogue over and over again frame by frame to accurately extract the different sounds from the track.

Character Sheet

The character sheet is used for creating a visual of the characters mouth shape and facial expressions when they make a specific sound for a word or letter. Because the dialogue I chose sounds like a well spoken victorian man in London I decided to make my character a man in a top hat with a monocle. On the left there is a space to draw the head of the character without his eyes and mouth and then on the right there are spaces to draw the mouth an eyes separately each one different depending on the sound that will be made. After the character sheet is finished I scanned it on to the computer and opened it with Photoshop ready to animate.

Final Output




Using the character sheet I opened in Photoshop I cut and pasted the drawings in a photoshop timeline while following my x sheet so I knew where exactly to put each mouth shape in each frame to match up the dialogue track that played in the background.

What Did I Learn?

Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the animation adding the eyes and reaching the end of the dialogue but I certainly know how to visually add dialogue to a character now. Before this session I had an idea how to attempt applying dialogue to a character but without learning the use of an x sheet or character sheet it probably would have taken me much longer to do.