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Animating an animal talking…NEED HELP!
I’ve just been informed by my boss that we are shooting a commercial in which a live-action cow talks. It actually sings…two words. Thats it.
I need to make this look believable and I have not dabbled in live-action animation. I consider myself pretty experienced in After Effects but I am unsure if this is the way to go. I have been doing some research and it seems that Dr. Doolittle (the one with Eddie Murphy) used a ton of After Effects for animal animation. Could it be as easy as getting a large amount of cow footage in hopes that I can get some mouth movement and then compositing it in?
RIght now it looks like I have a week before the shoot goes down. If anybody has any ideas on how to approach this (suggestions that I could make before they shoot so I get what I need) or if you have any information you can direct me to…it would be GREALY APPRECIATED! 🙂
Thanks
Bill Paterno -
2 Replies
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Well this is the Cow, so you’ve come to the right place.
Well There are several things you need to think about.
-Is the cow going to be facing you, Profile or quarter profile?
-Are you using locked down footage?Well 1 way you could do it is to buy a fake cow head and film the mouth moving via puppet and get the look of a realistic mouth. You could then track the live action cow and composite the new mouth over it.
Another way might be, stablizing the cows mouth, track the nose or something so that it’s staionary, even a slight movement will mess you up. then you may want to take a still frame of the cows mouth both the uppen and lower part and then using the bezier corner pin warp effect you can key frame the shape of the mouth to “speak”, it would be helpful to have a practical mouth saying the lines so you can see what a mouth is doing, what the upper lip does, what the bottom part does, what the eyes are doing etc. A mirror is also helpful for this. once you make the movement you can untrack your footage by pasting the anchor point keyframes into the position parameter and it will inverse.
I hope this can get u started, sounds ambitious
Andrew Kramer
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I theorized at the time that they fed Mr. Ed (a talking horse on U.S. TV show) peanut butter to make him move his lips and then selected bits that matched his lines. This site corroborates that theory.
https://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_029
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