A Beginner’s Guide to Animating Speech

Language is complex; the animators of the past truly had their work cut out for them. After so many years of trial and error, more than a few logical approaches to the challenge of dialogue animation have been developed.

Incorporating this logic into your own work is easy. If you've got your character designed thoroughly and your script at your side, animating speech becomes a fun puzzle to solve.

Getting Started: Lip-Syncing in Animation

To show you what we mean, we're going to use Timmy Turner as our lovely assistant. Butch Hartman's stylistic trademark is his quirky "flat" style of animation. It's a great place to start when first learning how to animate speech.

If you've ever seen The Fairly Oddparents, you already know that Timmy's mouth does a lot more than just this one pose. Take a moment to eke out every sound you know how to make, and draw one Timmy mouth corresponding to each syllable.

Wow, that's a lot of mouths. When they're all in one giant, random pile, the whole thing looks like sort of a mess, doesn't it?

Instead of guessing, hunting, and pecking as you animate speech, you should try doing it like the pros. How? First, you need to get organized.

The Tools of the Trade

While it's totally possible to animate speech without a plan, there are a few tools that you can use to make it easier to wade through large wads of dialogue that you need to animate. Exposure sheets and mouth charts are two of them.

What Is an Exposure Sheet in Animation?

Exposure sheets in animation, also called X-sheets or dope sheets, break a shot down into frames.

Much like the staff used to compose music, they make the intangible clear and easy for the artist to grasp. If the exposure sheet follows pre-recorded dialogue, the timing has already been established. At this point, you're simply documenting what is being said and how many frames each sound lasts.

Animation exposure sheets provide a column for frame number, action, and, of course, any dialogue heard. Traditional animation exposure sheets also include camera notes that explain how each stack of cels should be photographed (in a close-up or as a wide shot, for example).

Clerical details will also be included—the name of the show, the episode number, the scene and shot number, and the animator or animators responsible for the exposure sheet's contents.

The concept is straightforward enough. An exposure sheet maps the scene out. All that you have to do is follow its lead. Even a first pass will likely come close to the mark if the exposure sheet was drafted meticulously and followed to a T. The dialogue is usually broken down by the letter, especially in the case of "zany" or dramatic speech.

All that you have to do to make an exposure sheet is scrutinize your voiceover and walk through it word by word. Thanks to digital animation software and other creative apps meant for video, you can do so by scrubbing with audio enabled. You can keep track of your findings on a piece of paper or a separate Excel or Google Sheets file.

Once the homework is complete, all that you need to continue is a mouth chart.

What Is a Mouth Chart in Animation?

An animation mouth chart can be seen as your "keyboard" of expressions for a character. Each one is used to animate different phonetic sounds. With your exposure sheet in hand, putting the pieces together becomes simple.

Here, we've organized Timmy's repertoire into a generic pool of expressions. Having all of these groups accounted for will usually be enough to cover most ordinary needs.

This tool enables the animator to lay the scene out in a general sense. Once the entire chunk of dialogue has been animated roughly, it can be refined further with in-betweens and even original key poses to emphasize important moments.

If you're struggling to figure out how to animate certain words or pronunciations, we have good news: we've all got mouths that can serve as an immediate source of reference material. Sometimes, an "O" may be enunciated more like a long "U," and should be animated as such.

In this example, you'll also notice a bit of redundancy in a few categories. Sometimes, Timmy is happy. Other times, Timmy is sad. The last thing that you want is a character beaming ear-to-ear when he should be feeling down-trodden and at his wit's end. Being prepared for all of the emotions that your character experiences regularly allows you to animate any scene quickly and without hassle.

Related: What Is Clean-Up in Animation? How to Add Those Finishing Touches

Putting the Pieces Together

At first, dialogue animation might feel like an indecipherable nightmare. Once you realize that all words and sounds can be parsed into one of only a few possible mouths to draw, the task becomes much easier to wrap your head around. If you can say it, you can do it.