Lip Sync Guide

(For the tutorial, download the media in this folder.)

The first step is to record your audio track - don't try to animate the lips without it! Again, keep this short but impactful. Take the audio file off of the recording device or out of your Downloads folder and save it in your Lip Sync project folder.

Create a new .psd document, name it "mouths," and save it in your main Lip Sync project folder. This can be resized later, but keep it pretty small, ~300 px X 300 px @ 300 dpi.

Draw your mouth shapes on different layers in Photoshop (or other drawing software). 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.