Lip Syncing (Patreon)

I mentioned a couple posts ago that I had something else I was working on, but my brain had eluded me with the details. And then it hit me. WHILE I WAS DOING IT.

See, it came back to me eventually.

Those of you who've been with us for a while have probably figured out that the short releases we have each week, exclusive and public alike, are what keep the studio going. Our team individually focuses on small parts of those, so that we can pour our hearts into the big studio releases. I don't think we would have nearly as much support if we only released studio releases every couple of months instead of 4 VR videos and 4 non-VR videos a week. While I direct the studio releases and handle the "VRification", I try to keep my hands off of studio releases' creative aspects to allow the team to do what they do best; my time and energy instead goes to said short releases.

The newest way I plan to increase the quality of our short releases is to actually animate lip syncing.

As you know, we have a new in-house voice actress, Punky, who we've been using on a weekly basis. This has been a great opportunity for me to practice my lip syncing skills. While working on an animation I asked myself, "Why don't I lip sync every animation?", and here we are. This requires a complete overhaul of my schedule and workflow but should increase the level of immersion that we have with our animations.

My regular workflow consisted of some changes to lighting, cleaning up of general animations, adding variety and lengthening the clip, blah blah blah all the general stuff I do when I get my hands on a new clip for VR, then rendering it out for sound and voice. Once I had the sound back from the team, I would render the final version, apply the sound and voice during post and color grading, then render and compress the different resolutions. Then repeat for the non-VR version. In addition to all of that, I'll also go back into SFM to add lip-syncing to the animation after I get the sound, but before rendering the final version.

That's it. I could have just said I'll be doing lip-syncing from now on, but people keep telling me I am selling myself short on what I actually do. I didn't believe them at first, but the constant requests from people to VRify a video, with them just sending me the video, has me realizing that this may not be the case. I don't just take a video and push a couple buttons. It's almost always a complete overhaul of what the original artist created to make it work, and look good, in VR. If it were just pushing a couple buttons, I would be releasing 4 videos a day, not a week.

Back to work I go.

TL;DR: Short releases are now getting lip-syncing.