Any ideas how to make animals Speak in a video?

A

andycorleone

Member
I thinking in doing a funny video of animal singing a song, not sure where to start,

the only thing that come to my head is recording the animals in a green screen as static as possible and then replace the mouth from the same animal with the desire movement from selected footage. what other ideas do you have?
thanks
 
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Peanut butter for the starving artist = super low budget!

But seriously, ADR or peanut butter is your best bet.

To get a realistic animal mouth talking, you'll need experts in matchmoving and 3D lip sync animation. Both of these are specialty skills which people spend several years in school mastering.

Matchmovers take shot footage and recreate a 2d (or 3D) scene in which you can place additional virtual items. In this case, the match mover would matchmove the animal's face and then, together with a 3D modeler/animator, recreate a 3D version of the animals face. Then the next step would be to actually animate the 3D geometry that was created (and matchmoved) to match the words (lip sync animation). This is a time consuming process, and costs a lot of money if you don't know how to do it yourself.

Hope that helps.

Seriously, ADR, or peanut butter for the animals. Or peanut butter for the artists!

mcgeedigital said:
Low budget: Dog and peanut butter.
Real budget: After Effects and 2 roto artists/motion trackers.
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I always find five minutes in here usually makes 'em talk.

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Hi,

Old technique if you are not going to do any sweeping camera movements, in that case you will need Maya tool set.

Plan your shots via storyboard, then go to green screen, (or you can just shoot on site, but then you will need a few cameras to get the elements.)

Make sure you know what points of mouth opened and closed that you imagine would match the song. (storyboard and mouth matching to the song, animation strip sheet)

Get the animal to open mouth using peanut butter or some other way to get the phenoms (head elements to be used in the comping program)

Bring the footage into a 16bit or 32bit comp program, that can do grid warping, and time warping by pixel velocity.

Hands, feet and body will be another elements (depending on how much action the animal will be doing) but I guess it will be stationary for the most part.


In the comp program, you can use local tracking software, or external, match the head and mouth using points via nose and eyes.

Use grid warping plug, and a high quality time warp plug, that does pixel velocity.

Thats all the tools for basic animal talking. AFX, Combustion, Nuke, Fusion can do the work.

Hehe, yea unless you want to go into PRMan / Maya and do it the harder way. Stay with stationary shots.

Have fun!

-Tim
 
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