Music Videos - how to make shoot good lip syncing

ciencin

ciencin

Well-known member
I've been starting on music videos these past few months, but beginning to notice that a lot depends on how good the artist can lip sync to their song. Even when the shoot goes well and you sit down to edit afterwards, a few frames off and the whole video start to look completely out of sync.

So my question would be, what is a good recipe for making good lip syncing go smoothly? Anything to tell to the singer or general tips for shooting that would make life easier when editing?
 
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Practice, practice, practice. Shoot as many takes as possible, and from multiple angles - that will simplify editing, allowing you to cut mid-shot whenever necessary. That's a very practical reason that many music videos have lots of very short shots, hide the joins between the multiple takes used.

From my own experience lip-synching puppets (just as bad as humans :) ), you'll also discover some takes are usable if you fiddle with the timing, speeding up and slowing down a few frames here and there to keep the mouths in correct synch with the audio. This is a lot easier if your NLE has velocity envelopes, otherwise you'll be cutting and repeating lots of individual frames, which can be truly tedious.
 
You could also drop your song into an audio (or video) editing program and add 3 sync beeps (just use a tiny section of a censor bleep sound effect) before the song, export it, put it on a CD or iPod and use that as the playback device on set. It will save you plenty of time in post, as you'll be positive that the audio is perfectly synced up.....as for your subject....hopefully they know their own song well :happy:
 
Definitely need to have them sing it out loud, it will never work otherwise. The other thing is you need some way to really amplify the music. A lot of times what will end up happening is the drummer starts playing and he can barely hear the track, and then as a result no one else can hear it either, and they're listening to the off time drummer....so, cover those two bases and you should be doing quite well.
 
Check this OUT!!!

Check this OUT!!!

So my girlfriend talked me into entering this contest where you can submit a quick lipsync and have a chance to win $1000. It actually turned out to be fun...Thinking about doing some more vids and spreading the word to ALL!!!

...Any suggestions for songs? Ive already done F*** You by Cee-Lo apps.facebook.com/lionschallenge/view-response.php?cid=425:Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
 
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