9/15/08 - Lip synching

The picture below is not depicting ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics... They are lip sync images, and I've been staring at them almost all day while working on the "Blackbeard, Bluebeard and Redbeard" video. We knew going in that this was a long song with a lot of narrative spoken directly by the characters in the song, so we tried to include as many cut away shots as possible, but there's still quite a lot of dialogue to animate. I'm sure there's an easier way to do this than how I'm doing it... I'm still a hack on this animation program (Toon Boom)... but regardless, this is a pretty tedious process. It can take a long time just to do one little phrase in order to get the timing right, and even then it's hard to be exact, so we watch it over and over and move things back and forth and try to get it the best we can... For our next animated video, I think we're going to stick with something that doesn't involve any character dialogue!