Re: Floating mouth effect?

What you're proposing to do is neither easy, fast nor fun.

Singers MOVE when they sing. They move back and forth and side to side. They tilt and turn their heads. They turn to different parts of the audience to sing. In short, they move in three dimensions.

So how do you isolate the mouth? You will need to animate a mask around the singer's mouth, frequently on a frame-by-frame basis. This is called rotoscoping. If you search for the term here on the COW, you will find much written about it.

Then there's the black shape: you can create that out of a black solid In AE, no problem. Just keep in mind that to be totally convincing, this black shape's movement will have to synchronize with the mouth you just spent weeks cutting out. More rotoscoping.

Oh, here's another thought: is the singer's microphone on a stand or hand-held? What do you propose to do when the mic passes in front of your oh-so-carefully rotoscoped mouth? Ignore it? What if someone or something passes in front of the singer?

If all you have at the moment is the thought, "Hey! I've got a great idea!" I strongly suggest that you think long and hard about the potential pitfalls you could encounter. If you then wish to continue, you'll need to know how to handle these pitfalls BEFORE you encounter them... or all your hard work to that point will be for nothing.

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA