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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The method I used for Knucklehead is here. It was posted either here or on BF ages ago and it's really good if you have the software.
Here's the tip though. Turn your webcam around and film yourself miming to the song or dialogue that you're going to be synching. You can then comp that video into AE or whatever you use to edit thus, step through frame by frame and see exactly what mouth shape to use. No need to listen to snippets of the audio track.
Thanks this is very helpfull
Wow, I don't have AE, but that's still really useful. I never thought to film myself miming the words to match up the frames.
It's the simple tricks like this that are easy to miss. Thanks for the tip!
Very helpful. Thanks 0ldscratch! 
I used to do this with Blender until I found that using the waveform was a better option, then I moved onto just listening to it.
For talking, maybe. The waveform for a song is pretty much a solid block.
If I can just expand on your comment, Chris, it can also be easy to just keep a small mirror on your desk next to your monitor. However i think your method would be a tad easier.
Something I'd be VERY interested in is some tips/techniques on actually ILLUSTRATING the facial expressions. I have no trouble in doing this at a small scale (for example the forums emoticons are 95% my work) but doing that kind of thing freehand and remaining so faithful to the original Lego face blows my mind. Care to share? 
Another thing regarding AE, actually. Did you keep that yellow solid on the comp when you mapped it to the face, and masked out around the hair, or did you remove that after you'd finished animating it?
Sorry for all the questions Chris, it's just that this is an area I plan to embark on soon and our result is 100% what I wanted to achieve 
Last edited by Sean (March 30, 2010 (03:57pm))
Thanks a lot OldScratch. This could be very useful in the future.
I used to do this with Blender until I found that using the waveform was a better option, then I moved onto just listening to it.
How exactly did you do it in Blender? I've done a few mouth things, but it sounds like you were using something to do with the voices that I've never thought of.
If I can just expand on your comment, Chris, it can also be easy to just keep a small mirror on your desk next to your monitor. However i think your method would be a tad easier.
Something I'd be VERY interested in is some tips/techniques on actually ILLUSTRATING the facial expressions. I have no trouble in doing this at a small scale (for example the forums emoticons are 95% my work) but doing that kind of thing freehand and remaining so faithful to the original Lego face blows my mind. Care to share?
Another thing regarding AE, actually. Did you keep that yellow solid on the comp when you mapped it to the face, and masked out around the hair, or did you remove that after you'd finished animating it?
Sorry for all the questions Chris, it's just that this is an area I plan to embark on soon and our result is 100% what I wanted to achieve
I've answered some of this in the Releases thread. Like I said there, drawing the faces was the biggest challenge. I just kept drawing and redrawing until I was happy with it, did some work in AE, discovered that I needed a slightly different shape for some things, redrew, discovered that the transition from one shape to another didn't work, redrew, etc. In the end, I had 23 different mouth shapes including 3 different "eh" ones for different situations.
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