Chapter 21: How to Import Sound and Add Lip-Sync

If you decide to add sound to your animation, you must first prepare the sound outside of Harmony. Once this is done, you must add a sound element in Harmony to the organize the sound files in your animation. Sound will play in the movie until it reaches the end of the file or a stop frame that you created in the Sound Element Editor.

If you first create your project in Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, the sound will be cut up into the different scenes for you automatically.

You can import .wav, .aiff or .mp3 sound files.

Lip-Sync

Adding a lip-sync to a project can really enhance its quality and storytelling. However, it can be difficult to shape a character's mouth to match the sound at a precise frame.

To solve this problem, Harmony provides a lip-sync feature which analyzes the contents of a sound element and generates a mouth chart (see below) based on the eight animation phonemes (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and X for silence).

The mouth shapes used by Harmony are based on the conventional mouth chart used in the animation industry.

NOTE: The letters used to represent the shapes do NOT correspond to an actual sound.
NOTE: If you are doing cut-out animation, refer to the Cut-out Animation Guide, Character Building chapter, "Adding Extra Drawings" topic to learn how to add extra drawings to your character.

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 lip-sync the traditional way or let the system automatically create the basic detection.

You can refer to the mouth chart positions as you draw the shape of the character's mouth.

Automatic Lip-Sync Detection

Harmony can automatically map drawings in an element to the mouth chart you have generated for a sound. This can save time when you are lip-synching a voice track.

In the Layer Properties view, you can identify each lip drawing of a character. Harmony then automatically labels all of the cells in the character's element with the appropriate name.