Animation and Dope sheets

An example of a typical dope sheet

Whilst animation is obviously not a key part of the sound production showreel it does go hand in hand with the sound track as synchronisation is key to producing a realistic animation. The main link between animating and sound is lip synching. This is the process of making an animated character look like he's speaking the words being read by the voice actor. This can be a difficult and long procedure, however when done right it can be extremely impressive. Some animations simply open and close the mouth in order to represent the movement of the mouth, whilst others look in detail at phonemes to get a true representation of speech. A necessity when producing a lip synch is a dope sheet, this is a sheet listing all of the frames and when each sound occurs, for example on frame 73 the voice actor may be pronouncing the letter w, therefore the character needs to be mouthing the letter w. With a good dope sheet and a good grasp of phonemes the lip synch can start to take place. With the addition of gestures suddenly the character begins to come to life. A good animator should be able to make even basic models look lifelike with good use of the animation principles and great technique for lip synching, the example below is one such example.