This week, Ting’s class focused on Facial Animation III: Dialogue Shot – Lip Sync. The teacher explained the basic workflow of dialogue animation, including Blocking, Blocking Plus, and Polishing. I learned that when creating a dialogue shot, we should first set the key poses and facial expressions, then add body movement, mouth shapes, and timing, and finally refine the details.
In the Lip Sync section, I learned that mouth animation should not simply match every word, but should respond to the sounds. The teacher emphasized finding the accents in the sentence first, then animating the jaw opening, adding the main phonemes, and polishing the final mouth shapes. Different sounds require different mouth corners and lip shapes, so lip sync needs to work closely with the rhythm of the audio.
This week’s workshop was Overlap. We needed to use the provided sea monster file to animate it swimming, showing good follow through and overlap on its body and fins. This exercise helped me understand that different body parts should not move at exactly the same time. Instead, they need delay and drag, which makes the animation feel more natural.
