Lip Syncing

The last task we were set for this term and for this year would be the lip syncing task. Our teacher Sam told we would be doing this task after the Easter holidays and I was really looking forward to being able to do this task. In our first lesson back after the holidays I satrted to collect various sound clips from different movies like Shrek,  Toy Story, The Shining, The Blues Brother and Harry Potter. Basically I collected sound clips from my favourite movies. One thing Sam said that was important was to choose a sound clip that we wouldn't get bored of. I choose one that I found really funny and I was hoping it start to annoy me once I had heard it like 100 times.

The line I choose was from the film Shrek and it's Donkey telling Shrek "Please, I don't want to go back there, you don't know what it's like to be considered a freak. Well maybe you do?" I thought this would be really funny to do and I could get Max moving quite a bit.

When starting I imported the sound clip into maya and began aniamte Max's body to the audio, once I was happy with that, then I would start to aniamte his mouth. This was another important thing Sam told us to do. When starting to animate his mouth I drew out how I thought his mouth would move and look like when he his talking.

These drawings and using a mirror both helped me with how Max's mouth should look when saying certain words.

Here's the playblast video of the Max lip sync task.

After looking at the animation back, I am really happy with and I'm proud of it. This is the first time I have done a character talking and you can tell. At some points his mouth moves quite fast so if I was to go back I would have his mouth moving less, but near the end I think It does look like he is properly talking.