Create Smooth Lip Syncs in After Effects

1. 0 - Introduction: create smooth lips, sinks in after effects. Hi, welcome to this skill show class, where I'll be teaching you how to make smooth lip synchs in adobe after effects. The cool thing about this technique is that you will actually be able to animate between each mouth pose as opposed to just jumping between static poses. This taking his tried and tested I've used it for several successful animation projects on I just want you to be able to do the same. I want you to know no, this technique, because it works really well. So without further ado, let's let's jump right into it, all right? 2. 1 - Draw & Setup: draw and said Okay, so we are inside after effects. So as you can see of imported ahead, and it's always nice to sort of have, like, a canvas for your mouth. So I strongly encourage you to either draw ahead and illustrator and pull it in here and or , you know, just taken existing head from one of your character designs. So what I like to do is just pull that out to the side and, you know, just start recreating that with Shea players in inside aftereffects here. So to do that, we need our pen tool. Make sure you have stroke selected and no, Phil, make sure you get the right color as well and just start drawing like this. And I assume that you are familiar with using the pencils on that. I'm gonna dive into that. So those are our lips. I like to name my layers immediately after I've I've made them lips. Okay, so now we want to have a background for the lips. And to do that, select the lip layer and click Command D or Control D. And with that selected, let's just call it BG background. Now we wanna remove the stroke and give it a fill. And I'm gonna pick the color of my reference mouth, Of course. Okay. And move that below the lips. So now we're starting to get somewhere. Let's make the teeth. So I'm just going to select Wait, make sure you don't have any of these layers selected. When, when you're drawing. Otherwise you'll just be adding shapes to those. So with nothing selected, I'm gonna draw my teeth appear and don't worry about this, like exceeding the area of the lips. We're gonna fix that later with a mask. So I just couldn't call that layer teeth. And now this time you're gonna have it selected, because now we want to make another shape in this teeth group. So with teeth selected, you just go ahead and make the second set of teeth down here. There you have it. Now we have the teeth grouped in this teeth layer and let's make a tongue. So I'm gonna again. She used the color from my reference mouth for the tongue and make sure nothing is selected . And I'm gonna draw kind of like a roundish shape and call that Yep, you guessed it. Let's just sort these layers. So we they're all in the right place. The tongue needs to be below the teeth layer and the teeth and the tongue layer needs to be in between the lips layer and the background layer. There we go. And here is the cool trick. We want to link the path of the background to the path of the lips. So every time we move our lips, the background path will follow along. So just to illustrate my point, click the lips layer impressed you two times on your keyboard to bring out the path option and with your selection tool, go ahead and select. One of the points was Just translate this up here when I started. Animate this. You can see Onley, the lips are moving and we want the path of the background to just, you know, always follow the path off the lips. In order to do that, you click your background layer press view two times in your keyboard and bring out the path options for that. Now hold down the old key and click the stopwatch, Then select this pick whip and pointed all the way up to the path off our lip layer and let go, and that's it. Now, every time we move the path off our lips like this point, for example, you can see the path of the background will always follow or trolls up again. Now we want to use our background later as a mask for both our teeth and our tongue. So since we've already linked the path of the background to the path of the lips, weaken, just select their background layer and hit command D or control de. To duplicate it, call the duplicate a mask. Move that above the TIF layer. Select the teeth layer and under the track matte option. So, like Alfa Matt Mask. There we go. So now the teeth will always be inside this area. All right, so, like the mask again here And duplicate that because we want to mask our tongue as well and move this second mask right above the tongue layer. Select the tongue layer and just do the same thing. Alfa Matt Mask, too. And that's it. That's the That's the set up of the mouth, and now we're ready to move on to laying down some key poses 3. 2 - Key Poses: he poses. All right, now it is time to lay down some key poses. But before we do that, let's just make sure that we have all the relevant key frames set that would just make it a whole lot easier. So what I like to do select everything here. Actually, before we do that, I will go ahead and shy some of these layers. So I'm just gonna hit this toggle switch button down here to bring out the shy option. And I'm gonna like the masks and the background later as well, and just shy those layers and hit the shy button up here just to hide those. So now we can just focus on the layers that we really need to focus on lips. Dave Tongue. I'm going to select all three of them, President, you two times from your keyboard. What you want to do now is just everywhere. It's this path. Just gonna click to make a key frame for that path. So down here, down here and for our tongue as well, it's like every these three layers again. And President, you. So now we have everything we need here. Ready to animate now for the English language. I like to use this chart right here. Okay, so now what I like to do is create kind of like a guide layer with markers that correspond to all these different sections here. So go ahead and click new adjustment layer on. Just call it whatever you want. I like to call mine guide and let's move one second in your timeline here and create a layer marker you can go to layer at marker or use the keyboard shortcut. So here's a marker and the first keep owes we want to make for our mouth. It's pretty much already set, which is the sound A So I'm gonna double click Moliere marker and call this a Let's move to two seconds and create a new layer marker double click college. Oh, and you just continue to do this all the way through. I'm just gonna skip ahead in time, Right? So now I've named all my later markers so they correspond to these mouth shapes here and now. What we want to do is go to the first, which is a and it's like all these all the mouth layers and is make key frames on this point, and since we've already more or less made shape, that corresponds to the sound. A Let's just move on to o again, make key frames here and now we want to do is select the key frame for the lip later, because now we want to tweak it so it looks like an O. And with all these points selected on the path, you can double, click and basically just scale it and remember to hold down command or control just to scale it from the center point I would like to do is scale it down to maybe this size here . Okay to that. And click this first key frame again soon and a little bit. And using my selection tool like and tweak, move these points around, maybe even use the handles here to make a little bit more smooth. It's already starting to look a lot like maybe a little bit surprised right now. Um, but definitely saying something that could look like and oh, and let's just try And maybe this is even more like, you know, all right, so now we've laid down to shape here and see how smoothly it animates between the a sound and the O sound. So it goes like, Oh, wow, wow. All right, let's move along to the e sound and that this looks a lot like the A. So let's take these key frames. Copy them. And now here is the thing. If I select multiple key frames, copy them and move over here and just hit the paste button is just gonna pace the layers. So we don't want that. We want to paste the key frame. So the paste, multiple key frames plug in is absolutely essential. And, you know, if you don't have it, you should totally go get it. All right, so now we have the ease sound, And let's for this sound we need Teoh. Okay, Let's just go back to the A sound because I can see here. The the bottom teeth are not showing us much there. So I'm just gonna go to the half of the teeth below here, and I'm going to move them on way down and maybe the tongue as well. It's gonna move that down. So this is art is our a sound. And this is our oh sound, and you can again in here, you can tweak, OK, but I want to tongue to show on the on the o sound like it's like that key frame just moving down a bit. All right. Now for the MBE MP sounds where the mouth is basically shut. This could also be used as the resting pose for the mouth. All right, just lay down key frames below this layer marker end, tweak the lips. I'm gonna double click. Do you like this? Make it kind of wide on. Just put it together like that. They're we have Mo mo. Give me mo. All right. And after the final F V sound again laid down the key frames, Why should we should just copy it from the t and s sound instead? Because that looks more similar to what we want. Okay, so what we got here? Let us take the bottom teeth and pull them down and take the bottom point of her lips here . Moving up here. Maybe this could work just here. I'm not completely satisfied with that. Maybe should be more like maybe the mouth shouldn't be so wide. What's just say that this could work? All right, so there we have it. We made all the different key poses for the mouth here, and you can see how they animate beautifully between each other. All right, so now it's time to move on to actually animating the mouth to a short audio clip. 4. 3 - Animate to Audio: animate to audio. Now we're ready to animate the mouth to an audio clip. Now you can go ahead and record a short 5 to 12th audio. Clip yourself or you just find a clip with the person saying something. I've recorded a short clip here. I'm just gonna drag it into after effects imported here and put it into my composition here . What I like to do now is just assume in here so I can see that. I'm just gonna move those over to the side here. And it's important that you also move the guide layer. So in this case, it's like that. Okay, so now we're basically ready to start laying down the key frames based on this audio clip. Well, hello there. How do you do? This is an example of smooth lip sync. So that is the audio clip. So I'm going to start by scrubbing the timeline here, and I'm gonna hold down command key here on my keyboard while moving the play head case of the first. We don't have any sound, so maybe the mouth should just be relaxed like this. I'm gonna take the M sound here, and there's gonna copy those paste them there. And as you can see, I'm using the paste multiple key frames plug in, which is absolutely essential for around this kind of work. Well, what So we got, like what? You sound well, you sound right there. What? That's gonna sue him in a little bit. Maybe that starts on here. Well, but and it moves over to e sound. It's gonna take e and paste it here. All right, here we are killing animals. Oh, I'm gonna take the l hair and paste it. Well, well, well, well. How Well, hello there. Maybe that's e again. Well, and moving over to the O, he pays that well, there. We got like r l n sound again. Hold there, Lo. All right, so that works more or less. You can always go in here and tweak it to fit the sound even more. But for the sake of demonstrating this technique, this should definitely show you how powerful this lip sync thinking, I guess. Well, hello there. How do you do? Well, hello there. How do you do? Well, hello there. How do you do 5. 4 - Thank You: now that pretty much sums it up. I hope you've enjoyed this class on. Got the tools you needed to spice up your character animations. And I'm really curious to see what you've come up with. So please share your class project. I'm a potato. I'm sure that your fellow students will We'll find great inspiration and what you've made. And ah and McCue Kumba around, and that's it for now. So thank you for staying with me through this sculpture class and happy lipstick.