Michael O'Brien
Lip Sync Project
For my Digital media module in college we had to create a basic character and have that character lip sync a piece of dialogue we have chosen from a movie or t.v show. I started off by sketching out rough ideas of charterers which i could use.
I then took a few photos of myself acting out different mouth shapes to get the feel for what letters and sounds make which shapes and mouth movements.
I decided that i was going to use a piece of dialogue by Charlie Chaplin from 'The Great Dictator Speach'.
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
I decided upon using the first character i had sketched out. I imported the sketch into Toon Boom Harmony and laid each character part onto a different layer. For each layer component i used to pencil and brush tools to trace around the character parts but for the arm i used the line tool and converted the arm into a deformer as the arms would be the only component with much movement. I set all the character layers up in the correct order in the node view. For the mouth and the eyes i created separate symbols and saved them in my symbol column to be used when i needed them.
After i had the character synced up to the dialogue I then added a background to the scene and also added a camera which would start with a zoomed in shot of the face and pan backwards showing the full scene.
I really enjoyed this project, It was something i have never tried before and something i have always wanted to try in animation. I feel my finished piece was animated pretty well but if i was to do it again i now know what goes into lip syncing a character and i feel i would try a more difficult character. The software i used is a great piece of software to animate lip synced characters, I think if i was to use Flash i would have had a lot of difficulties animating my character the way i wanted him animated. The use of the symbols in Toon Boom made the scene easier to animate and less complicated when lip syncing my character
