I found this a little while ago worth watching, its a master class tutorial, Kyle Balda's 3D Animation Masterclass: Dialog Acting Tutorial, it in the June 2009 issue of 3D World Magazine. I really like his approach to animation, blocking down the first pass of the characters from the base and just moving the character in time to the sync using the base poses from the reference. He makes an interesting point about the eyes and brows these are an essential part of our body language and we communicate as humans our emotions through facial exspressions. If you watch the second pass where with just the block poses and the eyes and eyebrows animated, you can already read the characters thoughts and emotions without the lip sync.
The video also touches on a subject I had considered much - accents! upto now we've been animating characters from western backgrounds, but what if we were to animate an Itailan, French or German character? the mouth shapes would be totally different from a English character speaking English to a say, Russian character speaking english. This is something I'll definitely have to consider more in the profile of the characters I create, even a slight lisp or twang in the audio could contribute to the lip sync.
Tip of the day:
Always have one inbetween mouth shape for every two different mouths shapes
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