Dialogue for animation

I wanted to include dialogue in my animation as this helped tell the story, but also allowed me to practice more lip syncing. It would have been nice to get more professional people to do the voiceover, but with time restrictions I just got myself and my friend to do it as I knew what I wanted to achieve and it was much easier and quicker this way. Because I was going to voice both the woman and the fox, I tried to change the pitch and tempo of the recording for the fox. I wanted it to be a bit softer and less harsh than what I created for the woman.

Using both my script and storyboard, I sent this along to my friend to record his part, it ended up taking a few tries as he did several different version and also tweaked things in accordance to my preference. When it came to blocking out the lip sync, all you have to do is just import the sound file into Maya and offset the time if needed. The way I've been doing lip syncing so far, is keying out the opens and closes of the dialogue, where the sound begins and ends. From here I then add in the narrows and wides of the sounds. I use the waveform in the timeline to give myself a basis of where the dialogue begins and ends and I can roughly use the peaks of the waveform to indicate the louder points / harsher sounding words.

The rig I'm using for the man is much more complex than the fox rig and has the ability to change the mouth shape, whereas with the fox the only control is the open and close of the jaw. Because it's not as flexible I will have to make sure the lip sync is spot on as it would be pretty obvious if the mouth didn't match up to the sounds. I will also have to make sure that the performance of the fox matches up with the dialogue and also enhance it.