Mouth Sketches

For this month's 11 Second Animation, I decided to draw some mouth sketches for the 11 seconds of audio. I believe this will help me match up the mouth movement with the words the character says. I realized that I may not have been very accurate with the mouth movement I had for my previous animation. Again, it helps when you can understand the audio.

I looked in the mirror and slowly pronounced each syllable of each word in the entire audio clip. I would sketch the major changes I saw as my mouth moved in order to pronounce each sound. I may have exaggerated some of the movements, but it is much more visually pleasing to see mouth movement over exaggerated in animation than very simple mouth movement of lips opening and closing.

It is weird when certain animations have perfect mouth movement with the audio and other animations do not. Many Anime television shows have very simple mouth movement when the characters speak normal dialogue, but at least have a different variation of mouth movement when the character gets angry, sad, confused, or or hysterical. Eye movement is also very important, but mouth movement with audio seems to be trickier.