So the main issue that I have with lip syncing is speed. If they aren’t voice actors who’s job it is to create dialogue suitable for animation, the natural talking speed is incredibly fast. The vine exercise in particular was fast- I mean, they have to cut everything down to 6 seconds.

I was continuously tempted to put everything on ones. Rightly so, Christina told me it doesn’t look right. That you should NEVER do it. Well…I did it anyway. But only because in my exercises the movements of the bodies don’t sync up to the words of the sound exactly, so I had to redraw the mouths otherwise they would be floating around following the face. May as well try and make the transitions smoother right? Yes but actually no.

In the end it made the mouth look like it belonged to an entirely different creature. Although I really wanted to animate every single slight change in the sound, I had to resist the urge, go back and delete frames. I just focused on the syllables instead. It was a real case of trial and error deciding what to delete. I came out with multiple versions of the same animation.

At some point, you watch a lip sync so many times that it doesn’t actually look like they are saying anything. It was definitely the hardest couple of exercises we have done so far. Still, I am proud of myself. Before starting this course I hadn’t actually really animated anything.