lip sync insights

[toonertime]

i found this lesson on lip sync that seems
useful:

http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/lipSync.htm

[lwaxana]

Thanks for posting this! Everything else I've read agrees with the basic principle he uses. But it makes me wonder where to simplify the phonemes in a lip syncing workflow. I have been including everything in Papagayo and then deleting some extra mouth shapes in the animation. But this article is making me think it's probably more efficient to skip the overly literal phrase and enter the simplified version straight into Papagayo. But then does it even make sense to use Papagayo?

I have a little bit of linguistics background and I think that the best technical insight from this article is that if a sound is articulated in the back of the mouth (k, g, ng), it won't generally show up in animation. And some others (like t, d, n) might be absorbed into the surrounding vowel phonemes. Still others (like ch, sh, j) are probably distinct enough to show every time. So the "etc" mouth position would require a lot of attention.

But when he talks about moving the tongue for inner mouth movements, I would take that with a grain of salt because the phonemes he mentions are not related to each other by place of articulation or by manner of articulation.

This also made me realize that "th" is a sound that could use its own mouth shape. Is there a full list somewhere of the phonemes that Papagayo recognizes? And is it possible to separate out F and V because the mouth position is the same, but the cheeks can be very different.

[edit] oh darn. I just found the phoneme list and I'm already using them all. (rest - the closed position, etc, E, AI, L, MBP, FV, O, WQ, U) I guess "th" and a separate "f" and "v" would have to be done manually...

[neeters_guy]

Great insights. Beginning animators tend to over-articulate their lip sync. I'm guessing the "Princess Fiona Final Fantasy Syndrome(tm)" mentioned in the article is the opposite problem, that the lip sync doesn't live up to the intensity of the voice acting?