This is my lip sync of my partner, Yujie, for the exercise where we animate someone who’s native language is different to our own. I was hesitant to complete this exercise as I was nervous to animate words I couldn’t understand, especially given I would hear sounds I am relatively unfamiliar with. I was nervous to animate the character with the potential of placing emphasis in the wrong areas, but my partner reassured me that she liked my outcome. This exercise, while challenging, has been both incredibly fun and extremely beneficial as it forced me to break the lip-sync down to the basic phonetic sounds I heard, rather than how I think the mouth should be shaped based on the words.
I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of this exercise, from planning what we’ll say to recording sound and acting, to ultimately animating each other and sharing our films, this has been super fun and I’m very excited to see the whole class’s work compiled together! This has both strengthened my connection to my course mates as well as prepared me for the collaborative nature of animation within the industry.
I also took the feedback I received for my last lipsync exercise – which was to both pre-make the mouths so I could swap them out as I needed them, and to make them solid and whole, rather than an outline. I feel that being receptive to this feedback has improved my work as the solid mouth feels like it more effectively sells the illusion of my puppet talking, and it made the process of changing the mouth a lot simpler and less fiddly.