Here’s an example: Look in the mirror (or don’t) and slowly, deliberately, and clearly
enunciate the word
pebble: PEH-BULL. You’re trying to see just what exactly happens
visually, on your face and lips, during that word, so you can re-create it in animation.
Think about or watch what your lips are doing—all the details: The little puff in your
cheek after the B. The way the pursing of your lips for P is different than for B. How your
tongue starts its way to the roof of your mouth early in the B
sound and stays there until
after the end of the word. All these details give you a pretty good idea of how to analyze
and re-create the word
pebble in animation, right? Wrong! That’s exactly the wrong way to
do it. That’s how you would do it for a character who was speaking slowly and deliberately,
and enunciating clearly. This is how a mirror can be dangerous if used incorrectly. It leads
to overanalysis. None of these details are wrong—they’re just not necessary, and I’ll
explain why in the next paragraph.
This time, at regular,
comfortable, conversational speed, say, “How far do you think
this pebble would go if I threw it?” How did the word
pebble look? Check it out a few
times, resisting the urge to do it slowly. As far as the word
pebble is concerned, the overall
visual impression is merely closed,
a little open, closed, a little open. That’s it. In a sen-
tence spoken regularly, the word
pebble will most likely look the same as
mama or
papa.
Say the sentence again with that in mind. Try not to change what your mouth does, but
instead notice that the Opens and the Closeds are the most significant things happening
during the word. The mouth doesn’t open wide enough (in this case) to see a tongue, so
why would you animate it or need to spend time thinking about it? Because it’s “correct?”
That would be like animating a character’s innards. You can’t see them, but they’re there,
so animating them would be the “correct”
thing to do, right? Wrong. It’s a silly waste of
the time you could otherwise spend on the acting.
The Opens and the Closeds are the most important of any of the things a mouth does.
That’s why puppets work. Does it look like a puppet is really
saying anything? Of course
not, but with the flapping of the jaw happening around the same time as the sounds the
actor makes, your brain fills in the connection. You want to believe that the character is
talking, and that’s why the only truly important action in the word
pebble is open, closed,
open, closed.
This is how you analyze the right things: search for the overall impression, not the
details. It’s very easy to learn how to do
this but very hard to master; luckily you’re only in
the first of 14 chapters, and all the rest of them are going to help you work on mastering
this stuff.
Speech Cycles
This approach of identifying cycles and “visimes,” which you’ll learn more about in just a
moment, is likely very different than what you know now. If you’re looking for a phoneme-
to-picture comparison chart, you’re not going to get it here. In this approach, there is no
absolute shape
for each sound, and to point you in such a direction would do more harm
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than good, despite what you might think you
want to see. Each sound’s shape is going to
be unique, and you’ll learn to identify it as its components. To start, let’s talk about the
two speech cycles.
In its simplest form, there are two distinct and separate cycles in speech: open and
closed,
as in jaw movement, and narrow and wide, as in lip movement.
These two cycles don’t necessarily occur at the same times, nor do they go all the way
back and forth from one extreme to the other all the time. The open and closed motion
generally lines up with the puppet motion of the jaw, or flow of air—with
almost any sound
being created—while the wide and narrow motions have more to do with the
kind of
sound being created. In the sentence “Why are we watching you?” we get this sequence for
the Wide/Narrow:
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