Lip Sync

I close sound clip 8 for this project and knew straight away that I wanted to look at Disney for interesting mouth shapes and how they chose voice actors etc. I haven't really looked into Disney properly for any of my other projects yet but they famous for so many reasons, including their interesting design and lip syncs.



Genie Lip Sync and character performance



Robin Williams' performance of the Genie is one of my favourites of all time, the animation is so dynamic because as the directors Ron Clements and John Musker said 'when you get Robin Williams, you get hundreds of different characters'. I found looking into his performance really interesting and inspiring for my piece.

Voices of Alladin



Jafar Lip Sync

Jafar has arguably one of the most interesting lip syncs of any Disney character, his face is so strange that they really had to think outside the box on how they would animate him.

Beast Lip Sync and character design

 I looked at the beast as I was fairly sure I wanted my character to be an animal and I was interested to see how they got around the difficult elements of his character design when it came to lip sync.

Basic Mouth Shapes.



 

From the subject matter of the voice clip, I decided I wanted my character to be an orang-utan which lead me to closely research King Louis lip sync in the Jungle Book.

I did some sketched based on his different mouth movements and what shapes his mouth makes during his scenes in the film. 

 

The picture above is probably how I'll frame the character in the actual animation.

This helped me to familiarise myself with the character design and the mouth movements. However they are a bit too sketchy to be in the style for the final animation.

Screen Shots of King Louie

'ER' Sound

 Potential 'W' Sound

'AR' Sound



'AH' sound

'IH' sound

'EE' Sound

'OO' sound



The Jungle Book 2016

I also looked into the new version of the Jungle Book to see how it was done there. This video is really interesting as it breaks the animation down layer by layer and shows you lip sync in different ways. 

Basic Sketches for my animation

Here are some sketches of the basic mouth shapes I will be using in the animation. I decided to have the characters head facing the side as I think this will be easier to animate and show different movements in the mouth.

Here are all the basic sounds and mouth shapes needed for the animation.

Some are better than others but this means I already have planned exactly what shapes his peculiar mouth is going to make before I start and this gives me a better chance of pulling off.

There are many things I would change about this piece. I feel that due to time constraints it ended up looking a bit messy. I tried really hard to get the lip sync right but it isn't quite there. However I am glad that I attempted a difficult lip sync and it threw me in to the deep end and has really helped me to develop my understand of lip syncing to a character.

I would have loved to have worked more with hand gestures and body movement to go with the lip sync but I didn't feel I would have as much time to spend on the lip sync if I attempted it. This is something I will definitely look into in my next attempt at lip syncing.