Hi All
Sorry to make my first post a question.:rolleyes: I've read all the posts on Preston Blair's 9 shapes for lip synch, but I've got a project at work that is going to require lip synch for chinese. I am developing a maya blend shape mouth kit and am wondering how many different or new shapes I will need for simulating production of chinese rather than english. Anyone have any experience with this?
Thanks in Advance
Olwynn
When you lipsync, you lipsync sounds not words, so it won't matter what language the character is speaking. If the mouth shapes are correct and hit at the right place it will look fine.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
What Ape said....and think phonetically. ....write it out and break it down phonetically. EVen if your native language is english it is what you should do anyway lest you animate the word the way you as an animator says it rather than as the actor says it. I'm Canadian. If the american actor says the word "house" i may mimick the way the actor says it: "hows", rather than my way; "how-oos".
I appreciate another language for lip-sync can't be all that easy. It would help to have someone who speaks the language go through it with you and talk about how the character pronunciates, what the char is thinking/feeling and what's his/her/its motivation.
When comedian Victor Borge came to the States from Denmark in the 30s he couldn't speak english when he started telling jokes on Bing Crosby's show. It was writing english out phonetically,the way he heard english that helped him.
is there a tutorial online for lip syncing? I'd like to check it out :)
http://www.aniboom.com/radiohead/
Thanks everyone. I'll try and find someone who is a native Chinese speaker to assist me with the breakdown, I'm sure immediate observation is going to be my best friend. Hopefully I can get some video reference from the voice actors (who are being recorded in China afaik) but unfortunately I have to have the kit built before I get the sound so I have to get a bit of a jump start.
Cheers
I had a very similar experience recently. I sent one regular English script (for captioning) and another script with transliterated/phonetically-scripted dialogues. This dual-script-input helped the production team, in their lip-synching task.
-Jey
PS: Just out of curiosity, are you working in Europe/America and doing animation work for Chinese clients!?