In this article, BPOVIA is going to talk about lip-synching for animation. Specifically, BPOVIA Graphic Design Service team will show you ten wonderful sketches.

The process of matching the mouth-movements of your animation to the phonemes of your audio track is most commonly known as lip-synching. You may agree with our BPOVIA Graphic Design Service team, which is that animating speech is one of the most difficult tasks in animation. It is easy for designers at BPOVIA to just animate the mouth opening and closing, especially when animating for the web. But if you want to add actual expression and realistic mouth-movements, it helps to study how the shape of the mouth changes with each sound. There are so many variations, but the sketches (the image thumbnail in the right-hand column of this page) from BPOVIA Graphic Design Service team are renderings from the basic ten shapes of the Preston Blair phoneme series.

These ten basic phoneme shapes from BPOVIA can match almost any sound of speech, in varying degrees of expression–and with the in-between frames moving from one to the other, are remarkably accurate. Hereinafter BPOVIA provides a detailed explanation of it.

• A and I: For the A and I vowel sounds, the lips are generally pulled a bit wider, teeth open, tongue visible and flat against the floor of the mouth.

• E: The E phoneme is similar to the A and I, but the lips are stretched a bit wider, the corners uplifted more, and the mouth and teeth closed a bit more.

• U: For the U sound, the lips are pursed outwards, drawn into a pucker but still somewhat open; the teeth open, and the tongue somewhat lifted.

• O: Again the mouth is drawn to a pucker, but the lips don’t purse outwards, and the mouth is rounder, the tongue flat against the floor of the mouth.

• C, D, G, K, N, R, S, Th, Y, and Z: Long list, wasn’t it? According to the research of BPOVIA, this configuration pretty much covers all the major hard consonants: lips mostly closed, stretched wide, teeth closed or nearly closed.

• F and V: Mouth at about standard width, but teeth pressed down into the lower lip. At times there can be variations closer to the D/Th configuration.

• L: The mouth is open and stretched apart much like the A/I configuration, but

• M, B, and P: These sounds are made with the lips pressed together; it’s the duration that matters. “M” is a long hold, “mmm”; “B” is a shorter hold then part, almost a “buh” sound; P is a quick hold, puff of air.

• W and Q: These two sounds purse the mouth the most, almost closing it over the teeth, with just the bottoms of the upper teeth visible, sometimes not even that. Think of a “rosebud mouth”.

• Rest Position: BPOVIA suggests you think of this as the “slack” position, when the mouth is at rest–only with the thread of drool distinctly absent.

BPOVIA wishes these ten phoneme sets could help you with your design. Please remember that BPOVIA Graphic Design Service team is always at your service.