Lip_Sync Animation Process

In this task we were asked to carefully study the performance of 1 or more characters in a live action movie, from a dual choice of films.
The two options being "The kings of comedy" and "After Hours".

I Choose after hours, as I found it to be more casual and realistic in my opinion.
I edited the video clip I wanted  to use with Encoder and After Effects to make it into a wav. file which is what Maya Recognises. I Made few sketches of mouths in different poses, to mimic the shape it takes when making certain sounds.

After planning the mouth movements relevant to my clip selection, I started playing with basic mouth and eyes movement. Sticking to my plans without shifting any of the small side controls was tricky as you can see in the clip below I tried to show as much as possible with basic blocking first. The movement is completely unrealistic but at this point I'm just making sure the lips move in conjunction with the sound.

Here is what a day later the animation graph looked like.

The animation at this point is super choppy and laggy.

The next step is practising. That's right I acted out the scene over and over again to see how I would move my arms and hands when saying things like that and turns out that instinctively I tend to move my hands as if I was showing the size and shape of the actual sculpture to someone and when listing things my hands naturally tend to make this arched movements almost as if signalling comas between the words being listed.

Here are 2 clips showing the animation at this stage and here you can see how the character now moves the hands along with that she says and her eyes move before her hands, to show that all her actions are thought out first, even before moving her hands the character moves her eyes first, except for the part where she fixes her hair; because the hair is so close to her eyes, I thought she might fix it being careful not to poke her eye or something or just to see what it looked like. So she stares at her hands throughout the whole motion and also shows how she is bothered by the fact her hair moved.

I did other small details like her breathing, the way she moves her head side to side and back and forth to show interest but also to accentuate certain words ("Ye-eah") and sounds like the letter "P" or "TR".

 Before polishing the animation I also took the liberty to add some props to give the animation some more sense but also to show how comfortable the character, as after all this scene is occurring in a cafe.

When polishing the scene I looked at smaller more settle quirks the original actress has. Such has speaking fast in a childish manner, and later slowly when she realises the other actor is interested in the product being advertised. Other things she does are Pull her eyebrows up a lot when thinking and taking this long breaths. She also speaks with what is known as a "duck face" or just speaking with her lips slightly punched out. In this scene of the movie she is meeting the protagonist and she does this as part of her acting to show she is attracted to him

The for the polished version I changed a good 60% of the frames to curved lines in the Graph Editor to smooth out the animation. I added extra frames as well to smooth correct smooth movements but adding extra frames to show some anticipation.

After finishing the animation and polishing small details like eyebrows, smaller mouth controls, the hair flick and other body movements, I took a break to refresh my perception of the animation and when I watched it again ti was pretty close to the original performance from the film but it felt off somehow. So I asked around for feedback and one of the suggestions was to exaggerate the movements and add reactions to her words

Download Final Version HERE!! : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kFnvPTxQj_c5gLsijSt6CUSkJvM149Pz