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  • Animating Mouth of real footage

    Posted by Chermaine Wu on February 20, 2009 at 6:19 pm

    I have tried to use AE ‘s puppet tool and mesh wrap to animate a mouth on an one year old boy but it doesn’t seem as good as those E-trade baby or any other baby talking commercial. Is there any other suggestions? We have filmed an one year boy playing, sitting and running around and we have footage of his sister’s mouth and i need to composite them together so it looks like the boy is talking. What i am trying to do now is to export the footage of the boy and his sister as image sequence into photoshop and composite them together frame by frame and put them back in to FCP but it takes so long and i have quite a lot of videos to finish. Is there anything i can do through After Effect or other software?? Thanks

    Carmen Sandrelli replied 14 years, 2 months ago 5 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Kevin Camp

    February 20, 2009 at 6:38 pm

    you might try the cc split or cc split 2 effects. they would allow you to place points at the corners of the mouth and then animate the ‘split’ to make the mouth mouth open and close. cc split 2 gives you control over the top and bottom of the split.

    depending on how much the babies head moves, you may need to track the corners of the mouth and apply that data to 2 nulls, then use the expression pick whip to link the split points to the nulls, effectively getting the split points to track the corners of the mouth.

    you should also be able to link the split amount to the audio levels of the voice track, which may make it easy to sync the mouth movement to the audio.

    also, those commercials you are imitating use compression artifacts to their advantage… by mimicking a web cam’s high compression rate and lower frame rate, they mask compositing flaws. a trick you may want to keep in mind.

    Kevin Camp
    Senior Designer
    KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

  • Chermaine Wu

    February 20, 2009 at 7:19 pm

    Thank you so much for the advices. yes, i had the close up of inside mouth footage and the one year boy has teeth too. so i guess it won’t be a problem.

  • Sean Mcdonald

    June 24, 2010 at 9:53 pm

    i am trying to animate a baby’s mouth to sync with the Voice over using cc split2. can you explain a little more in detail what is required to get the audio to play using the split 1 and split 2 effects, as well as, using the null objects?

    thanks

    Sean McDonald
    Art Director
    Fox6 News

  • Troy Witt

    December 11, 2010 at 1:13 am

    We are doing the same kind of thing… a total eTrade baby spoof. Bought CrazyTalk to do the mouth animating (from a still at each “scene”) and we’re using Motion to comp the mouth back onto the baby. It’s looking fantastic! CrazyTalk is the trick here.

    Troy Witt, President
    Take One Productions, Inc.
    http://www.TakeOneDigital.com video production & webcasting

  • Carmen Sandrelli

    May 16, 2012 at 11:54 pm

    ANY RESPONCES, PLEASE DONT USE TECH. TALK, SUCH AS CC OR CC2 I DONT
    UNDERSTAND TECH. TALK. PLEASE SPEAK AS PLAIN AS YOU CAN TO ME.
    THANKS A LOT,
    CARMEN

  • Carmen Sandrelli

    May 17, 2012 at 12:22 am

    ANY RESPONCES, PLEASE DONT USE TECH. TALK, SUCH AS CC SPLIT OR CC2 SPLIT I DONT
    UNDERSTAND TECH. TALK. PLEASE SPEAK AS PLAIN AS YOU CAN TO ME.
    THANKS A LOT,
    CARMEN

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