I am working on our new stop frame and miniatures course here in Adelaide with Anifex. There are so many brilliant aspects and while we were working on replacement animation for lip sync yesterday, I got to play with Magpie Pro. I had heard of it but not used it.

The program allows you to load either 3D target heads/mouths/expressions, or drawing or stills of the claymation mouth variations for all the major mouth shapes related to all the major mouth sounds. You then feed in a .wav file and the program will do a first pass at lip syncing it based on the audio alone. Once done you can modify it to better suit your character. In the later versions you ca then go further and time out the eyes, eye brows etc .

At Anifex they then get director approval before outputting a running sheet of the each mouth movement mapped to each frame of the audio sequence. For mouth replacement animation you now have a road map of what mouth is required at each frame of the animation.

Now this does not ‘animate’ the character, at this stage all the animator has is a frame by frame guide to what the mouth should be doing but not the ‘performance’ that goes along with that lip sync. It does free the animator up to focus on the sub text of the scene and the emotional content of the performance and not struggle to try and work out what each sound should like like at this point in the animation. It also provides some other subtle benefits. When talking our next word, after the one you are animating – can often times affect our mouth’s position at the end of a word. With Magpie not only can you get the current word correct, but animate a more natural character by factoring in the natural mouth bias towards the following sounds of the next word, something very hard to do if you are just stepping forward through the dialogue in a more ‘old school’ approach.

There is a free download version for both mac and windows available from the magpie web site.