Embedded Files
The first step is to record your audio track - don't try to animate the lips without it! Again, keep this short but impactful; we're looking for 15 - 30 seconds only. Take the audio file off of the recording device or out of your Downloads folder and save it in your Lip Sync project folder.
Draw your mouth shapes on different layers in Photoshop or Illustrator. Label each layer according to the sound (phoneme) it corresponds to. Many sounds can be illustrated with the same mouth shape (for example, "f" and "v"); for good lip syncing, you should have at least 6 different mouth shapes. Below are a few mouth shape guides; as you can see, all of these use nine or more unique mouth shapes. The positions of the tongue, lips, and teeth make a big difference; for example, the top teeth touch the bottom lip during “f” and “v” sounds and the tongue touches the back of the top teeth during “t” and “d” sounds.
Once you have your mouth shapes, it's time to set up your After Effects project. Import your character file and your mouths as .psd or .ai files. Make sure you change the "Import as" field from "footage" to "composition - retain layer sizes," and do not check "make composition." If you have everything set up correctly, your file will be imported as a new composition with the different layers separated.
Open the Character comp and set the duration for longer than your audio. Import your audio file and bring that into the same comp.
The key to animating your lip sync is setting up the mouths comp correctly. First, make sure all of the mouth layers are visible and stacked on top of each other. Now, these next steps will probably sound a little strange, but they’re important. Each layer needs to be a single frame long – so highlight each layer, move the playhead in the timeline to the 00:01 mark, and hit alt and ] on the keyboard – this will trim each layer to the correct length. Next, the layers need to be in sequence. Do this easily by selecting all the layers and going to Animation>Keyframe Assistant>Sequence. Hit OK and the layers should move down the timeline in sequence.
Now, you need to make the composition the exact length of the sequenced layers. To do this, move the playhead in the timeline to the last mouth shape and hit N on the keyboard – this will create the end point. If your start point isn’t at the start of the composition, move the playhead to the beginning and hit B. Highlight the area between the start and end point, right-click and choose “Trim Comp to Work Area.” The length of the composition will shrink down to the length of all the layers in sequence.
You should now have a composition containing only mouth layers, each of which lasts for a single frame. Drag this composition into the composition with the rest of your puppet and position it in the correct place on the head.
Next, right-click on the mouths composition and choose Time>Enable Time Remapping. Extend the time-remapped layer so that it fills the time of the audio track, and delete the second (only the second) keyframe in the timeline under Time Remapping. Right-click on the remaining keyframe – it should be at the very beginning of the timeline – and choose Toggle Hold Keyframe. You should see the shape of the keyframe change.
If you’ve done everything correctly, you should have a layer in your composition that allows you to switch between any of the mouth shapes you created by typing that mouth shape’s frame number into the seconds position of the Time Remap property (in the image >> this is the 0:00:11:00). So, if your character makes an “L” sound and the L mouth shape is frame number five in the mouths composition, you just type “05” into the Time Remap value. The “Hold Keyframe” type means that the number you type in will remain until you type in a new one – After Effects won’t try to automatically animate between the keyframes.
With everything set up, animating lip sync is just a matter of slowly going through the timeline and matching up the audio with the appropriate mouth shapes. Note: to have a visual reference for the audio, make the waveform visible by selecting the audio track and hitting LL on the keyboard. You can also use CMD + Drag the cursor to scrub through the audio.
When everything is done, don’t forget to animate the rest of the character as well – as people speak, it’s normal for them to move their eyes, hands, and body. Combining all of these will really make your character seem alive.
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