The phonemes exercise was my cup of tea. Although I’ve had some light practice with lip sync before, I’ve never had the experience of getting to work with a phoneme rigging system, and it was wonderful to be able to breeze through it like that. The speech itself only took me about an hour to complete. I found the below diagram extremely useful in helping me get a feel for which consonants have a similar shape.
I also spent a lot of time staring at myself in the mirror speaking along with the words, checking back every few minutes like I was painting a self portrait.
I psyched myself out a little bit though, wondering if the mouth sounds I was making were natural or if I was trying to fit the shapes that I knew how to make. The rig did not have an option for “R”, and I watched myself say “longer”, making that “er” shape over and over before realizing that it didn’t matter anyway; the speaker is British and I am American and so I can’t necessarily rely on myself as a reference in that specific instance- the rig would not actually be making the “R” pose if it is to be accurate to the audio (this small complication gave me a lot of sympathy toward anyone doing a lip sync for a language that they do not speak or may not be their first language). Regardless, if I had needed the “R” I would’ve just used the “T/D” pose and gone in manually to tweak it a bit, or in the case of the Franklin rig I could’ve added a little bit of the “O” in there.
I finished the phoneme work wanting to do more with Franklin, I couldn’t just leave it like that, like some kind of unnerving robotic rap battle.
And so I gave Franklin some movement. Despite intending to film from the torso up, I animated the hips and legs, as I’m coming to realize is absolutely essential for believable motion. I actually animated every single piece of the rig, albeit minimally, as it’s only a 70 frame animation I only meant to give Franklin a little added emphasis to his words. I decided for whatever reason to make his body language just a little bit untrustworthy.
Satisfied with my work, I spent a long, long time adding in an environment and festive sweater for absolutely no reason other than my own enjoyment of the project. And I did certainly enjoy the project very much. Looking forward to working on phonemes more in my performance animation project!