This post follows on from Adventures in Lip-sync: Part 1
So, at this stage, we’ve got a string of gibberish from Repeat After Me and not much else. To get this working there’s four key ingredients:
All I need to do is hook them up.
Big things brewing for the annual MZ Christmas card. Russ and I are full of ideas from Flash on the Beach so expect to see some multi-user gaming via Moock’s awesome Union platform and a test-run for our new Red5 streaming server.
Watch this space…
So, we’re now card-carrying members of Club GreenSock. After a lot of hopping around from Tweener to Fuse Kit and lots in between, we’d pretty much settled on TweenMax (and its siblings) as the tweening engine of choice a little while ago. The release of v11 has even more treats in store, particularly with the bonus classes.
Recently I’ve been working on an animation for the pharma division of Harte-Hanks. It’s in our classic MZ-stylee and it’s been fun doing some old-school 2d Flash animation. Zoe’s given me some great illustrations to work with and Charlie’s imagination has been running riot with karate-chopping leaps and flabby men on treadmills. Lots of tweens, lots of Graphic symbols, lots and lots of keyframes. I’ve also gotten to play with CS4′s new IK bones for some of the sequences too but that’s a whole other post.
From the outset though, I’ve been procrastinating about lip-syncing the narrator’s voice-over with the character. My rationale was that any edits to the timing would mean re-doing work… always fun, so best leave it til last, but really it just seemed like it’d be an arduous time-consuming manual task. In all the years I’ve been doing animation in Flash I’ve never found an easy way of doing this. Animation is a craft and it seems the only solution to most tasks is put some time and love into it. That said, code is your friend (and a cruel, cruel mistress) that has often helped avoid the monkey work.
So I went looking for a pre-existing solution… First port of call, as always, was “The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams (if you don’t own it, get it!). Then some Googling that rapidly disappeared down the rabbit hole of visemes, phonemes and natural language simulation dissertations. Whew! No easy answers there either.
At the last Bristol FUG, I had a good chat with master-animator Dave Cropley (from Evans & Finch) about how he does it. He pointed me towards software called Magpie that seems to be the standard in the 3d animation world. Nothing seemed to exist in the Flash/ActionScript world though so I decided to roll my own.
Here’s how I did it…