Ofcourse, character animation is nothing without facial animation, it gives life and personality to the character, it indicates what is going on on a specific situation. So, we were asked to do a phoneme animation, we had access to 3 different audio clips which we could use and ofcourse choose a character from the library with a facial rig to start animating.
I was super curious to try a facial rig with a phoneme system, not because it’s easier but because it showed me the right movements of a 3D character face, everything moves not just the lips. I went through every rig in the library as I always want to try a new one, but I ended up using Franklin again as his facial rig was amazing, in my opinion. His face is lifeless until you use the phoneme system, he looks boring and his body is super weird as it has weird curls in his upper body.
At first, I was quite scared as I thought it would be much harder to do this task, but I was wrong, it was super fun mostly because I was looking at myself and I realised I do the most awkward faces when talking – every one does, but we do all those movements so fast that no one notices.
The first thing to do is ofcourse shooting reference footage, choose a character to use, create a project folder and insert the audio clip on the timeline (the prefered audio formats are .wav or .mp3) and finally we can start animating!
This is the reference I shot:
I also found a diagram that helped me figure out the “key poses” of the mouth in specific syllabes/sounds.
It was quite fast to do the phoneme animation, but it looked boring as the only thing moving was the mouth…
So, I decided to add some life to it, I tried to find the clip from where the audio clip was taken and see some other movements the actor did, or even just to take ideas for the rest of his body.
But the actor is very still, so I just thought I would make franklin disapointed while talking.
This was the final result:
I really liked the final result, although it is not the best animation ever, I really enjoyed doing this task as it was fun and I learned somethings I didn’t understand how they worked.