Lip-Sync Test #1: Flautism

With roughly a month to go before I hand in my critical evaluation, it might be apt to actually experiment with, y’know, animation of some sort. Being properly introduced to the dope sheet/lip-sync process last week, I figured that’d be a good place to start. After all, the lengthiness of my film is largely down to hefty chunks of dialogue, and if I don’t know how to lip-sync, I’m a little bit fucked.
Rather than brazenly charging into sequences for ‘House Guest’, I thought it’d be best to work on something completely separate and one-off. I’ve isolated three short, random samples of conversation from recordings made for various music projects, with the intention of going through the dialogue phonetically and familiarising myself with the dope-sheet process.

This teeny-weeny chunk of dope-sheet represents about 2.5 seconds of dialogue. Bear in mind this is for a sequence with barely any body animation or direction.

Without a lightbox at my disposal (we have plenty on campus but it’s been kinda muggy, so fuck it - I’m stayin’ in) I put my first attempt together just using a series of rough sketches. While this does the trick for a little bit of test animation, in the long run I won’t be able to use this method when working on the actual film. Inevitably I’m going to have to find some way of obtaining a lightbox for the summer if I want my output to be at all valid.
As I'm dealing with lip-sync primarily, the plan was to have no animation other than mouth movements. However in this first example I couldn’t resist the temptation of throwing in some facial expressions too. The overall effect is pretty stilted (owed mostly to the fact that the bodies don't move at all) but hey, the mouth movements sorta kinda work, which was the point after all. Check 'er out!

Hopefully with the two remaining test animations I'll be able to refine the process a little more. But given that this little sequence represents about six hours of work, and I have until February to make this film, I'm cautiously confident that it may turn out kinda cool...
BTW Many thanks to my anonymous flautist for letting me use her voice.