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Bricks in Motion
Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
A place to discuss, share, and create stop motion films.
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What version of After Effects did you get?
Brilliant!
I haven't actually dona any face animation tests yet, but I did some when I had my old version of AE.
What I did was download a phoneme chart, then I made a mask in the shape of the minifig's mouth.
Next, I looked at the chart and animated the mask to match the phoneme for the current audio sample.
This phoneme gallery by user mario72 provides some various digital faces, originally for the mouth-animation program "GlueFace". I personally work with a bunch of those, too, using Photoshop. It might help you as well. 
- JD
This phoneme gallery by user mario72 provides some various digital faces, originally for the mouth-animation program "GlueFace". I personally work with a bunch of those, too, using Photoshop. It might help you as well.
- JD
I am looking for some that look a little bit more LEGO but thanks anyways.
Using the mask method gives an overall smoother effect, much like the mouth animation in the films of NickDurron.
Am I the only one who hates smooth mouth animation? Working with LEGO, I don't see the point of having a smoothed mouth when the rest of the body is stop-motion.
I'd have to agree with you, Littlebrick. The faces in Picturesque and Unrenewable did not fit well, the phoneme approach is much better in my opinion.
I would have to agree too. I found a nice tutorial http://library.creativecow.net/articles … _synch.php
Sorry to bump this but I was going to create my own lego faces phoneme thing in Illustrator, and I was wondering if there was a program to either sync up the audio and mouths or paste them in. (btw I have after effects, photoshop, ect)
Aquamorph, it's so cool you pulled up that tutorial from Aharon Robinowitz. I used that tutorial way back when it was new in 2005. Once you get the hang of it, it's a great way to lipsync. I've found it's easier to lipsync with a video guide. If you're recording your own dialog it's easy, just capture video with the audio. Or you can lipsync yourself to the dialog after the fact.
Either way all you have to do in After Effects is synchronize the guide with your footage and copy the mouth shape for each frame. Normally it takes just a little touching up after going through it once. I think Aharon mentions that it looks better if you don't change phonemes too rapidly. I've found that to be true as well, especially at higher framerates. I just did (for the first time) a24fps lipsync. I used new phonemes about every other frame or roughly 12fps. It just works better.
EpicDavi, After Effects is the program. Watch the tutorial Aquamorph linked to. You'll use Illustrator to stack the phonemes in layers, and After Effects to sync those layers with the audio.
Hey Samwise
Nice work on your 24fps lipsynch video. Would be right in that any program that can create and manage layer masks could do this.? I've got Hitfilm and was thinking of having a go to see if it can do something similar..
Hey Samwise
Nice work on your 24fps lipsynch video. Would be right in that any program that can create and manage layer masks could do this.? I've got Hitfilm and was thinking of having a go to see if it can do something similar..
Yes but it is much easier to do in After Effect.
AngryChair,
I'm not familiar with Hitfilm, so I don't know how similar it is. The core of this technique is the Time-remapping feature in After Effects. It allows you to assign a numeric value to each phoneme and keyframe each phoneme simply by entering its assigned value. If you can rig something similar in Hitfilm, go for it!
Cheers for the reply Samwise. Was playing around with Hitfilm and created some simple .png masks in Photoshop which imported nicely and gave a half decent result so I'll continue to play around with that. Afer Effects is out of my price range sadly.
Again though, awesome work on your video. The animation was really good quality as well which I feel deserves a mention.!
Cheers
Here is how I do it.
Face tracking in 3dsmax.
My workflow is much more complex. I start in Photoshop creating the face presets. Animate and sync in Premiere, then use the rendered output in 3ds max to track the head movement. Finaly compose the 3dsmax alpha render in AE.
Hmmm... interesting.
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