Lip Syncing and Performance Animation

Original reference footage (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

I decided to choose this clip from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it shows a lot of emotion in Gene Wilder’s voice as he angrily tells Charlie that he will get nothing. When deciding on an audio clip to base my voice sync animation on I wanted a clip with a very strong emotion (in this case anger) and even when closing your eyes you can definitely tell exactly what kind of emotion and facial expressions he is making in the film clip.

Acted out footage.

I acted out the footage myself, though my camera is not the best quality I wanted to get an idea of especially how my eyebrows, nose and mouth were moving so I could use them to inspire the animation. I did not end up perfectly copying the acted out footage as I think my eyebrows were possibly a little too stationary, and I wanted to make the animation slightly stylised with exaggerated eyebrows, nose, and eye movements. I also moved my head around in the acted-out footage but decided I wanted the head to be stationary in the actual animation.

Final Animation.

I began the animation process by animating the jaw bounce movements, trying to match them to the audio. I further refined the mouth shapes after this, as well as nose movements including flaring of the nostrils and moving the nose up and down as he angrily moves his face a lot in the animation. After I felt I had gotten to a good stage with the mouth and nose, I moved onto the eyebrows and eyes, trying to make them bounce with the face and make the animation look satisfying. I further exaggerated this bouncing effect by using the top of the head control to add slight squash and stretch when he opens and closes his mouth wide, as well as making his pupils and irises slightly enlarge when he sounds most angry, to add to how angry he looks. After this I further refined the mouth area, changing the curl of the mouth as well as slight tongue and teeth movements.

I decided to record more footage a few times to try and get more expressive movements in the body as the original footage didn’t have much arm movement. I didn’t remake the facial emotions from the new footage as I felt like I was mostly just using the reference footage for inspiration and it was fine if my animation was not completely the same as the reference as long as it resembled it. In the final animation, I also added some more hand movements near the end to make the animation more interesting.

I blocked out using the same methods as for the face, and then cleaned up the curves in the graph editor. I added more squash and stretch for some parts, as well as trying to get the timing and speed on the hand movements correct. To make the hands stationary on the table for parts of the animation I used the method of duplicating the model to match the FK and IK switches to fairly seamlessly switch between them.

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