Lip-synching for Flash

Having your audio line up with the movement of your character is an important part of your animation. It is very distracting to the viewers of your animation if the sound is out of sync.

First set up your audio:

• Export your audio file from Audacity (File --> Export Audio --> Save As .AIFF file)
• Import your audio file to the Library (File --> Import --> Import to Library)
• Create an empty layer & label accordingly
• Drag Audio from Library to the empty layer
• With the audio layer selected, in properties change “loop” to “stream”

When Lip synching there are certain mouth shapes that match up with different sounds or phonemes. Some examples are posted below. Use these as guidelines but keep in mind there is nothing as helpful as watching your own face or the face of a friend make the mouth shape. You could use PhotoBooth on the Mac as a mirror.

There are several options on how to lip-sync in Flash:

• You can lip sync by drawing frame by frame - takes more time but is often the most natural looking

or

• You can create separate symbols of each mouth position & swap them 
• In each keyframe that you need a different mouth shape: Right-click on the symbol --> Swap Symbol
  
• Choose the symbol you want to use for that keyframe

or

• Make one mouth symbol - this could be inside a head or character symbol but could also be on its own:
• Click on the mouth symbol to enter edit mode
  
• Create a new keyframe inside the symbol for each mouth shape
• Obviously you need to actually change the shape on each keyframe
• Make sure you keep a list of which frame number represents which sound
  
• Leave the symbol edit mode to go back to your scene
  
• Click on your character/head/mouth symbol and click on properties --> Looping --> Change "Loop" to "Single Frame"





• In each keyframe you need to change the mouth position, you can change the frame number (the number to the right of "First:") in the properties panel as necessary

Keep in mind as you are syncing your audio, you often want to add the mouth shape into the frame before the sound actually starts. Good Luck!