How does one lip sync in animation?

Question

What is the best way to go about lip syncing in my animation project?

Answer 1

Lip syncing is carefully matching animated character movements made by their mouth, hands, face and body and with the recording of the character speaking so that the animation looks and sounds more natural and easy to watch and listen to.

The process of the lip sync animation can be fun and you can provide a lot of emotion when the character is speaking.

First, I'd suggesting starting by figuring out what your character will say by drawing out a storyboard. The words that the character is saying is called the dialogue.

Next draw your character in the position and point of view you want the audience to see your character when it's talking.

Draw the mouth in a relaxed position, a happy position, sad position, angry position, tired position to get a sense of the emotion of the character. Next based on the words of the dialogue, circle similar phoneme or consonants and syllables. Draw all those mouth shapes.

Once you have a handle on standard mouth movements for a specific point of view of the character, animating the same movements over and over maybe tedious for some people, especially when there is a lot of dialogue and a deadline is pending.

There are ways to speed up the process through auto-sync features some animation software programs have. But for animating frame by frame, you can use your speech mouth drawings as a reference which will be a good place to start.