Extended Preston Blair phoneme series

Extended Preston Blair phoneme series

It always amazes me how few phoneme shapes you really need to give the impression of a talking character. This article covers a slightly extended range of phoneme mouth shapes, based originally on the Preston Blair series. This extended set adds a few extra mouth poses useful for sequencing mouth movement to dialogue tracks. The main additions to the Preston Blair series is a specific phoneme shape just for Th (as in thanks or thrash) and an additional phoneme shape for the C, D, G, K, N, R, S, Y and Z sounds, which is similar to E but provides an extra target pose when you have a run of sounds that are similar in mouth shape (but need some slight variation for contrast). I find these occur frequently enough to deserve their own poses.

Getting started

Each phoneme shape shown here is accompanied by example word sounds, these are by no means golden rules always be followed - but are there as examples of the kind of sounds the mouth shape represents. If it looks correct, then it is correct and the best trick to getting lip synch looking correct is have an easy way to repeatedly preview your sequence along with your soundtrack so you can go back over the sequence again and again fine tuning poses. Some lip-synch tools (as included with Hash Inc. Animation:Master) provide quick and productive ways of generating your dopesheet timing, other video sequencing programs can also be used to calculate your pose timings but require a more manual process (such as Adobe Premiere).

Phoneme A I

Example sounds are: apple, day, hat, happy, rat, act, plait, dive, aisle.

Phoneme E

Example sounds are: egg, free, peach, dream, tree.

Phoneme O

Example sounds are: honk, hot, off, odd, fetlock, exotic, goat.

Phoneme U

Example sounds are: fund, universe, you runner, jump, fudge, treasure.

Phoneme C D G K N R S Y Z

Example sounds are: sit, expend, act, pig, sacked, bang, key, band, buzz, dig, sing.

Phoneme C D G J K N R S Y Z

Example sounds are: grouch, rod, zoo, kill, car, sheep, pun, dug, jaw, void, roach, lodge.

Phoneme F V

Example sounds are: forest, daft, life, fear, very, endeavour.

Phoneme Th

Example sounds are: the, that, then, they, this, brother.

Phoneme L

Example sounds are: election, alone, elicit, elm, leg, pull.

Phoneme M B P

For many M, B and P sounds, it's important that the phoneme shape should be reached before the M, B or the P sound is made, the sound is often only made as the pose breaks. Example words are: embark, bear, best, put, plan, imagine, mad, mine.

Phoneme W Q

Example sounds are: cower, quick, wish, skewer, how.

The rest shape

The rest shape is not a phoneme as such but a shape used during pauses between words and sentences.

Get the tweening right

In addition to placing the correct phoneme shape next to dialogue sound, keep in mind how your software tweens from phoneme pose to pose, the default settings are rarely good enough. When you need a clear definition of a particular mouth shape you'll need to space matching or similar mouth poses at the start and end of the hold. A common example is during the rest point between spoken sounds, where mouth movement often pauses. Don't forget you'll need to go deeper in and adjust the timing curves of your phoneme sequence to get the ease in and out of mouth motion looking natural. Rendering after each animation pass - playing the sequence against the audio track is really the best way of catching problem areas and refining your work. My final comment is try not to over cook your phoneme keys (don't have too many). Pick the important sounds and hit their shape clearly to emphasize the dialogue flow. Best of luck!

Related links

Preston Blair reference mouth shapes

Hobbit phoneme character face examples

Wizard phoneme quick animated example

VST plugin wizard vocal musical interface element

Principles for Lip Synch Animation by Keith Lango

Lip Sync Making Characters Speak by Michael B. Comet

Preston Blair phoneme series

I've often looked for good examples of 3D phoneme mouth shapes; but there isn't that much material available out there publicly - it's about time someone uploaded, so here goes :o) The first run of these standard 10 Preston Blair mouth shapes took about 3 hours to complete. I've revisited and updated the data several times since then - testing them on several different dialogue examples. All shapes shown here conform to the standard Preston Blair phoneme series.

Each image has been rendered at 300x300; for all you LipSynch users out there (part of the old Hash Inc. Animation:Master) or Magpie, feel free to convert these images to TGA or BMP as needed. I find they work well for the initial blocking out of most dialogue sequences. If you find them useful, great, glad I could help!! Check back here from time to time as I'll continue to revise the content; already posted are some extended phoneme shape examples.

Creating phoneme pose shapes

Each pose is setup entirely with muscle level control point changes, no bones involved. The top set of teeth stay in a fixed location for all poses, this locks the upper jaw to the characters skull. If you don't, you'll end up with a set of false teeth, or worse, your character may end up looking like it's about to take out one of the supporting cast in an Alien style chomp out!

Depending on the feature set of your chosen software, a beneficial technique can be to create a low level set of poses relating to the underlying muscle movement of a face. I often build poses for Lip Stretcher, Lip Tightener, Sneering Muscle, Bottom Lip, Tongue, Smiling Muscle, Sad Muscle and Jaw. Various combinations of these poses can be mixed together to create the desired phoneme shape and give you greater control when you come to fine tune your dialogue performance.

A and IE

OU

C, D, G, K, N, R, S, Th, Y and ZF and V (sometimes like D or Th)

L (sometimes like D or Th)M, B and P

W and QRest

Use asymmetry

Remember to add some asymmetry into your facial poses! The images here are devoid of emotion and personality so as to show each phoneme clearly. This is a bad thing for a real dialogue performance, so make sure you liven up your characters with asymmetrical expressions - just think of the gag with the little green aliens in Toy Story when the all go "Ooooooooo..."

Related links

Extended phoneme reference mouth shapes

Hobbit phoneme character face examples

Wizard phoneme quick animated example

VST plugin wizard vocal musical interface element

Principles for Lip Synch Animation by Keith Lango

Lip Sync Making Characters Speak by Michael B. Comet

Bilbo Baggins phoneme series

Here's a first run of some extreme phoneme shapes to get my version of Bilbo Baggins talking. I've not rendered a live lip-synch test yet, so there will be quite some tweaking to these phoneme shapes once I've seen them in action. Poses are based on an extended range derived from the original Preston Blair phoneme set.

Project update

As you can probably tell, this personal project (first toyed with back May 1988) has been some what super-seeded by improvements in Hash Inc. Animation Master Software. I do plan to rework this data and provide some sample dialogue and acting animation clips, though I don't really want to get caught up in all the Lord or the Rings cliche animations that are bound to start appearing now the film is out and about.

Phoneme A I

Phoneme C D G J K N R S Y Z

Phoneme C D G K N R S Y Z

Phoneme E

Phoneme F V

Phoneme L

Phoneme M B P

Phoneme O

Phoneme Th

Phoneme U

Phoneme W Q

Related links

The Hobbit Bilbo character design

Extended Phoneme reference mouth shapes

Preston Blair reference mouth shapes

Wizard phoneme quick animated example

VST plugin wizard vocal musical interface element