Talk Like a Pirate Stream

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Though I streamed on September 16th, I still wanted to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, canonically celebrated on the 19th. To that end, we explored a few methods for lip sync in After Effects. Below you'll see some examples of what we got up to. And you can check the replay here.

Subscribers to the stream can download the project files at the right ---->

Our first methods to explore looked at using audio levels to drive simple mouth movements. During the stream Mark Coleran pointed out that this is very similar to the technology of Supermarionation created by Gerry Anderson that used audio levels to use the mouths of puppets. I just use expressions and properties, but the idea is the same. I made a lovely parrot and skull that show some of the limitations of the concept.

I was able to add some nuance to the skull animation when audio levels plateaued by mixing in a scaling wave function to oscillate the jaw when audio data peaked. If you're tight on time, and have the stylistic lea way, this might be a method for you.

I also spent some time looking at viseme swap methods using time remapping. But my preferred method is to have tweens in the mouth shapes. Swaps feel too rigid for my taste. To that end we fired up the 3rd party plugin Joysticks and Sliders that helps us map properties to a 2 axis controller. There are other methods like using DUIK that can achieve similar rigging. But, the result is 4 key poses, one neutral middle pose, and all be bends between those creating 9 unique shapes that can be tweeted between.