SIT has procured Papagayo and Lip Sync Pro for me to research as part of my Professional Development. I've chosen to focus on lip syncing for the whole 10 days because I'm shy about doing it and therefore shy about teaching it. If I want to continue animating children's music videos, learning how to do this efficiently and effectively will come in handy. We already have Adobe Animate and Character Animator software and Toonboom also has lip syncing modules. I will also look at After Effects and their lip syncing tools.
My intention is to create a sequence of animation and lip sync in each of the software packages so I can compare and contrast the pipeline and results. I'm going to use assets I'm already working with for Follow Your Heart, Waste Free Wanda, and Girl and the Imagination Warehouse. I'm going to concentrate on 2D and Stop-motion animation over 3D because those are the assets I have handy and the kind of animation that I'm working with most frequently. As part of my research, I can look into 3D lip sync but I don't anticipate that I will be doing any practical tests in Maya.
Lip syncing gets done after all other steps of the animation have been finished. This includes facial expressions, eye brow movements, etc. 3 Steps to Improve your Lip Syncing.
Puppetry, like Kermit the Frog or other Sesame Street characters, has some good tips on getting lip syncing right. The puppeteer responds to the biggest beats of what's being said and not to hitting everything, which ends up with a floppy floppy mouth.
Don't spend too much time overanalysing every mouth shape when speaking- this leads to overdone lip syncing.
Phonemes: There are 26 letters in the English alphabet but 44 sounds are created using those letters. The letters are then broken into consonants and vowels.
https://www.dyslexia-reading-well.com/44-phonemes-in-english.html
