Hey,
i just wanted to get some opinions on the importance of lip synching in animation reels.
Ive been looking at alot of really great reels latley and id say 50% of them have a lot (if not all) of great lip synching scenes, really great work. It got me thinking how important it is in this day and age to be good at lip synching. I have fairly well avoided it up to now because i would rather be animating large full scene motion than the lips and face of a character but ive begun to reconsider.
I have read a few threads on the cgtalk board that give a varying response. I agree that for movies and highend cg that it would be a very important, if not necessary skill to have. However for games im not to sure, i cant remeber any really good lipsynching in games other than halflife 2. Does anyone here have any opinions or comments on the topic? some industry or insider comments would be greatly appreciated.
Im in japan using all my spare time to work on my portfolio so when i come back to australia i can start seriously applying for jobs and id like to know ive spent my time well learning the most important concepts.
Styles has pretty much covered most of it..
I see lots of portfolio's and i see a hell of alot of Lipsync.. and most of it done not so well.. and it especially frustrating when their character animation is terrible.. It highly unlikely you'll get hired purely for facial animaiton.. unless that what theyre looking for.. and then you better really good..
I'm of the opinion, that especially in games, that I want to see good character animation, Like JI said, with interactions, either with objects or other characters.. gesturing, weighting, anticipation, action, reaction.. etc.. If the body can't tell the story, how can you expect the face too..
anyhow if you want to do lipsync back it up with good and robust character animation ability.. then you'll do better than someone with just facial animation..
seeya
For games work, it's true it's not as important since it's dictated by the capabilities of technology and project scope. At the moment there's not that much required to that degree, but it is becoming more and more so. Consider that starting work on a title right now with a projected finish of 2 or 3 years will put you easily into next gen specs, and it becomes a whole lot more viable -- another argument to this however, is to show that you're a skilled animator effectively, facial animation is an integral part of portraying character and personality through expression and movement. So it can go a long way in communicating greater depth of character and bringing things to life, which is one of the most important things for an animater to be able to show.
With that said, I think I need to clarify another thing - I've just talked about expression and movement, not really directly lipsynch. If you haven't really got into lipsynch yet, then it's very important to learn first that 90% of good lipsynch is before the lips and jaw start to move at all - it's in the movement of the head and eyes and body language which is directly linked to what the character is saying and expressing. Once you've got this down, then refinement of the lip shapes and tongue and jaw movement is secondary to it.
I guess at the end of the day, to show a breadth of talent as an animator, you must be able to show a full range of animation ability. This could range from large fluid acrobatics with multi-character interaction, to subtle movements of the eyes and mouth when a character delivers a scared/shy/sad line of speech. Lipsynch fits into expression and adds subtlety to all ranges, so it is important if you want to show that breadth of skill.