This is a short lip-syncing animation made using a free-use rigged model by the Mery Project, and using audio from The Amazing Digital Circus.
This animation was made for a college course in which we were tasked to take any audio clip with dialogue we could think of, choose a model, and make a lip-syncing animation for it. Due to the nature of both the model and the scene from which the audio clip originated from, I focused on making this animation more cartoonish than realistic while also attempting to make the motion feel natural.
I started by posing the mouth for each syllable one-by-one, keeping in mind the next syllable it would have to flow into and the current tone of the syllable. I also moved the mouth itself to add more dynamic facial movement and tie into how I planned to move the head. The tone of the clip escalates as it continues, leading to more exaggerated mouth poses until the final word which de-escalates slightly with a confused "Wha-?" Additionally, as the scene itself adds a censor bar over the mouth for the censored swear word, I decided to add a censor bar of my own after posing the mouth at the beginning of said word which disappears when the word is finished being censored.
My next focus was the rest of the facial motion - the cheeks, the eyes, and the eyebrows. The character starts with her eyes closed before snapping open and staring ahead at assumedly a specific subject, before closing her eyes and snapping them open again for the swear word where she starts to freak out more. At this point, her eyes are mainly following the rotation of her head before they re-focus on the previous subject. To add to the incredulous cartoon nature of this scene, I changed the size of the pupils and irises themselves. When the character realizes that what she said was actually censored in-world, she blinks again, her eyes return to normal size, and she looks down towards her own mouth.
Next was the motion of the head itself, winding up for certain words and snapping to place more emphasis on them, while also displaying the emotions of someone who genuinely has no idea what's happening. She shakes her head and points it slightly down when she realizes that she was actually censored in-world.
Sadly, due to the limited time-frame and the work put into the lip-syncing itself as well as the facial motion (not to mention other coursework at the time), the rest of the upper-body movement is under-developed as I was unable to find the time to animate the torso. However, I did what I could with the time I had. She starts off gripping her head, and the hand pose stays throughout the rest of the animation - not ideal, but it does fit the manic tone of the clip. She swings her arms to emphasize her words and bafflement (although I may have made them move slightly too much), and shrinks them back with her hands pointed at her mouth due to her confusion over her words being censored.
Lip-syncing was entirely new to me before this project, and this was my very first attempt at it. I used this opportunity to experiment with the movement of the mouth, and I would like to think it turned out well.