Lip synching

I recently had a play with lip synching. I must admit I thought it would be extremely difficult to do but I was surprised actually how relatively easy it was. I'm not sure I would like to try to do it with Primary age children though but who knows, if I get a child that's G&T in this area...

I'll just go briefly through how I did it. I recorded the voice in Moviemaker and then, using a spreadsheet I set up one column with frame number and another with time, based on 16 fps (0.0625 sec per frame). From the Moviemaker voice, I got the times of each syllable and added this to another column. Then, using 4 basic mouth shapes I took the mouth shape that corresponded best to the syllable.

This is what I mean:

Then when shooting, I placed a vinyl cut out of the appropriate mouth shape onto the puppet - held on with double sided tape. I had help from my son who was keeping a note of the frame numbers and told me when to change the shape.

Here is the result:

Web Cams

I've just recently bought 3 web cams from Tesco for around £20 (for the 3). They come with mics too. I was surprised at the quality of the stills it is possible to obtain with these cameras. I've been using these cameras with some Year 6 children with some good results. To keep the cameras steady we've been using Blu Tack. The children have been using the scanner and camera wizard thing with XP to take the photos (why isn't this utility available with Vista!), they have then been putting their movies together with Moviemaker - a little cumbersome but they got there in the end.

This set up does seem to be the cheapest way to do stop frame animation. I'll try and post some of their movies soon.