11 Second Club - Lip Syncing

At first, I had imported both characters into one scene to animate all together, however once I had started lip syncing, both of the facial controls were sat over the top of each other. This made things more complicated, since I had to move the right controls and it would be hard to select the right ones. This is when I discovered you can animate one character on one scene, to then import the animated footage into another scene.

So instead of my original plan of setting up the scene first, the very first thing I did was to lip sync both characters in separate scenes.

The facial rig for Moom

Since I am familiar with this character and used the phoneme sheet (with the positions of the face as a character pronounces each letter) as reference, it wasn't too difficult to achieve my final animations.

The first character is the male; he seems to be quite a pretentious guy who is slightly self centred, so I wanted to show this bored expression through his eyes and the way his eyebrows move, especially when answering the phone at the end.



The second character is female; she seems to be very interested in what the man has to say, and when she is interrupted by him she is a bit put out and annoyed about it so I wanted her facial expression to represent this.



After I had completed both facial animations, I combined them into one scene to see if they work:



So far I think I have done well with this animation; the characters are starting to be brought to life through the audio and seeing them both together shows me how well this animation is taking shape.