VIRTUAL LIPSYNC

The most useful and crucial piece of software in the creation of Victoria was a plug-in called Voice-O-Matic. This plugged straight into 3d Studio Max and allowed us to create true lip-sync without spending weeks animating keyframes.

When you import your audio files into Voice-O-Matic it converts the sounds it hears into a mouth shape which are known as phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. The software assembles these phonemes in a timeline and chooses the appropriate mouth shape to go with each phoneme. It then outputs the animation data for the mouth and face control vertices and before you know it you've got a talking / singing 3D avatar.

Whilst this all sounds fairly straight-forward there were some problems we encountered whilst using the software. The first of these problems is associated with the quality of signal you input. If you just take the track straight off the album then the voice data will be clouded by the other instruments. So in the way one creates a re-mix we took the parts of the track and worked with these individual elements or "parts" as they are known in the trade.

So for WWYS we used the vocal tracks to create one aspect of the visuals i.e - the head. Whilst we used the other elements of the soundtrack to create the cityscape.