Facial animation is the element that may be the most effective to convey the illusion of life: acting skills are required. Having a close-up reference for the animation makes easier to focus on the face expressions. The first step is to carefully listen to the dialog to animate and understand the accents and nuances and motivation behind those words too.

Foe example in my audio for the animation:

“For five minutes, could you not be yourself, for five minutes!”

Accents: the f’s are very stressed and “yourself” is highlighted and the f’s in the last “five minutes ” are even more highlighted since they are shouted.

Attitude: annoyed, angry, irritable

Subtext: I have very little patience and I am stressed I don’t need you to stress me too”

Once I have studied the audio creating a reference video is important so that once is ready making notes on the acting such as brows poses, eye darts, blinks.

When animating a Lip sync usually is better to start from the broad movement and then go into details, so it is better to start from a jaw bounce/motion rather than the mouth shapes since the initial timings for the jaw movements are easier to overlook it would be easier to say the words yourself to better understand the dynamic. The second element to work with are the mouth corners when the lip sync is actually animated. In this phase working in parallel with the graph editor could help focus onto the eases in the animation. After the mouth shapes are added which help refining the lip sync: a general rule is that vowels happen when we hear the sound in the frame, on the other hand consonants moth shapes should hit the shape one or two frames before the sound happens; this works even better for plosive consonants which require a buildup and release of air to be voiced. The next step is the tongue movement which help the credibility and add a natural movement and feel to the animation. The tongue should be seen when touching the top of the mouth, such as on “n” sounds.

Blinks comes after and help adding life to animation even more. There can be different kind of blinks: fast, slow, half blinks, fluttering eyes, takes, disbeliefs. Most of the time blinks are dictated by the emotion and thought process of the character (a natural effect for blink is to add a very slight up and down movement in the brows making the animation more organic).

Another important element of organic facial animation is eye darts, used to keep alive static moments of the animation, our eyes rarely stay focused on the exact same spot for more that a second. Decisions about eye darts depends on what we need to communicate about the character’s mental state. Using shapes for eyes darts movement can help, like triangles to use as a guide to choose the path for them to make.

When it comes to acting choices for animation there should be a reason for everything done if it does not have a justification it may mean that is not relevant.

Reference book

Naas, P., 2018. How to Cheat in Maya 2017. Milton: Chapman and Hall/CRC.