Advice on talking Dog Short Film

[odie]

I making a short 10-minute film featuring a talking dog as one of the main characters. The film will form part of a film production masters thesis on Talking Animals in Film. I was wondering if any visual fx pros or Cg animators or anybody else for that matter had advice on how best to approach the visual fx of the talking dog. From early research into films featuring talking animals such as Zookeeper, I understand that the visual fx steps involved include scanning the live footage; tracking; modelling the 3D mouth; lip-sych; composting and animating the facial features. What 3D animation SW would people recommend using and how would I go about achieving the effect? And given that I will be a novice, how long would it take to produce the visual fx? Thanks.

 

[GHKAM]

I can't comment on CGI, but just wanted to mention I've seen some talking dog movies/TV where it appeared as if they fed the dog some chewy dog snack and its mouth moved up and down/later overdubbed, apparently editing out the part when feeding it a snack.

There's also the overdub of animals "talking"/as if thinking out loud, without any mouth movement at all which they did in Disney's 'Homeward Bound'.

 

[Cassius]

If you have to ask what modelling software to use, you don't have the experience to reliably produce this. I don't mean that to be rude, just realistic. Find software you like and practice with it if that's something you really want to do. If it isn't something you want to learn, find someone who can do it for you. 3D modelling and animation isn't a matter of clicking a few buttons and being done. As a novice, it would likely take you too long. If you really want to do it yourself, and you want to use 3D effects for it, you'll need to start practicing now. Again, making this look realistic is very difficult, even if you had done some modelling in the past. So my advice is to find someone who knows more than you, or find another method- as with those mentioned above.

 

[Andrius Simutis]

Whose dog talks anymore? Don't they all just send text messages these days?

…actually that might be your solution…have a texting dog instead of a talking one.