Mouth Charts

T-EXC-005-003

Adding a lip-synched dialogue to a project can really enhance its quality and storytelling. For your character's mouth to match the sound, you need to breakdown the sound by frame. When listening to your audio file frame by frame, you need to mark down what portion of the sound is pronounced for each image. Once your sound is broken down or decoded, you need to assign a mouth shape to each frame so that you what mouth to draw when animating. To do so, you need to refer to a mouth chart. A mouth chart is a simple page containing mouth shapes coded with a letter. This way you can easily mark down the mouth code (letter) beside each frame of your breakdown.

A conventional mouth chart used in the animation industry. Note that there exists variants of the common mouth chart, but here is the main one listing the most common mouth shapes.

Here is an approximation of the sound each mouth shape can produce:

• A: m, b, p, h
• B: s, d, j, i, k, t
• C: e, a
• D: A, E
• E: o
• F: u, oo
• G: f, ph
• X: Silence, undetermined sound

You can refer to the mouth chart positions as you draw the shape of the character's mouth. The mouth shape is always called by the same letter. This makes it easier for animators when they check the Xsheet breakdown of the dialogue.