38: Lip Syncing

Probably the first thing I learned at Disney was the different mouth shapes for lip syncing. Here is a chart similar to the ones they used at Disney some 20 years ago. There would usually be a person who would scrub the audio using a jog shuttle and they would write each shape by its corresponding letter on a dope sheet.

Nothing much has changed since I learned these shapes other than it can now be done on computer using software like lost marble's Papagayo. This great little tool is able to scrub the audio and then all you do is put in the right mouth shape for the corresponding sound yourself. When you are all done then you can export a data file and then import that into Blender. So long as you have the corresponding shapekey names to the Papagayo files, Blender will set up all the right mouths on your character to the correct sound. This tutorial by bugzilla2001 shows you how.