ANIMATING THE ANIMATORS MASTERCLASSES

REPORT WORKSHOP BATH
VOICE AND LIP SYNC WITH A PUPPET
NEVILLE TRANTER
24 APRIL 2005

To be able to use voice and lip sync (syncronization) with a puppet with a moving mouth, you have to first know and understand what effect a puppet has on an audience when it moves in space. In other words, how do you animate the puppet to make it believable for an audience?
These are skills which can be taught, and every group you do a workshop with, differs in their experiences and knowledge of animating the puppet. These basic skills of “breathing life into a puppet” are absolutely necessary, when starting to work on giving the puppet a voice and achieving perfect lip sync.

Firstly, you have to realize that once you begin to animate the puppet, you are beginning a dialogue between the puppet/puppeteer and the audience. You could compare it to a game of table tennis; that once the ball is played and hit, the game continues on and on, action-reaction, action-reaction, action-reaction until the player who hit the ball first decides it’s over. This requires from the player (puppeteer) that he knows what he is doing and what effect he achieves with his puppet on the audience. He knows how to place the “ball” to get the right reaction.

I always begin the first lesson in animating the puppet, by letting the puppet be very still and then very slowly discover the world around him. For instance, the puppet is sitting on my lap. My hand is in his head, the mouth is closed, and his head is hanging below. I have looked very carefully where the eyes of the puppet are, and I know that it is essential to look at the world through the eyes of the puppet. If I don’t do this, I will never be able to bring him to life. The puppet’s name is Zeno. I call his name. His head which was hanging, rises instantly just a fraction and then stops still. Action- Reaction. His head is now in a new position. I count two seconds and then I raise his head until his eyes meet the eyes of the audience. End of movement. The puppet remains still for another two seconds. The puppet has now done two movements and has remained still (a pose) for two sets of two seconds. And in both these sets of stillness, the audience have experienced the illusion that the puppet is “thinking”. In the next step I call the puppet’s name again. His eyes, which were fixed on the audience, turn in one clean movement to look directly in my eyes. He stops. Half a second later, his mouth drops open half an inch. My thumb has opened the mouth, letting the jaw drop but keeping his eyes transfixed on mine. He remains so for another two seconds, then turns quickly again to look at the audience with mouth still open and freezes. End of exercise.

Adding a Voice and Lip Sync.

I do the same exercise, only this time when the puppet turns away from me, I let him say “Leave me alone!” and then one second later, drop his head again into the original position.

To understand the mechanism of lip sync, you have to know that your eyes always go towards the movement. A magician uses this tactic to distract his audience so that they don’t see what he is really doing. If you walk into a room where a television is on without sound, your eyes will be attracted by the movement. The mouth of my puppet Zeno is ten times as big as my mouth, so when I let him say a word, the movement is very large compared to my mouth saying the same word. The next step is to get the right movement in your hand. This can be practised without the puppet.

If you have a tennis ball in your hand and you throw it, you will see how your wrist moves forward as the ball is released, the fingers and thumb opening and then relaxing back again upon each other as the wrist and hand return to the original position. It is this movement you use to say a word. In a sense you are ‘throwing’ the word at the audience. So when Zeno says “Leave me alone!” I punctuate every word and I ‘throw’ the words towards the audience. The word ‘alone’ becomes two movements; ‘a’ a shorter movement and ‘lone’ a longer movement. Each movement is also a complete movement, which means that it starts with stillness, then the toss, the fingers and thumb open and close again, ending again with stillness. Another important element which has to be considered is that the energy and loudness of the voice corresponds exactly with the energy and size of the movement. If Zeno yells “LEAVE ME A-LONE!!!” , then the movement is just as punctuated and exaggerated as the loudness of the voice. Timing of movement and voice together is essential. A perfect illusion is created when the fingers and the thumb (the mouth of the puppet) close one fraction of a second after the voice is heard. The audience zoom in on the movements of each word spoken; mouth closed, mouth open, voice “LEAVE”, ( mouth closes immediately a fraction of a second after the word is released), voice “ME”, (the same again), voice “A”, (the same again), voice “LONE!!!”, (the same again). The head of Zeno is still for one second and then drops. End of exercise.

If the exercise is well executed, then the audience have not only believed that the voice came from the puppet, but have also emotionally responded to the puppet. What you then have, is a true choreography of movement and sound in space with a puppet, where the keyword behind every action-reaction is, focussing. Minimal movements to achieve maximal effect.

THE WORKSHOP

I began the workshop by telling about myself and then asking everyone to tell their name, a little about their background and experience with puppets and finally why they wanted to do the workshop. For some it was completely new and for others it was to catch up on their skills again. This talk in the beginning is very good for the social atmosphere in the group and also I can get a better judgement of what I can specify on during the workshop.

The puppet I use in workshops was then introduced. A character from an old production of mine called ‘The Nightclub’. His name is Zeno and he played a cynical old entertainer. He has the size of a small child when he’s sitting on my lap. He’s also a puppet with a characteristic head which initiates an immediate reaction from an audience, especially when he becomes animated. He is also an ideal puppet to use for workshops. I use only the one puppet and everyone in the group gets to work him. This has the enormous advantage of giving everyone in the group the chance to experience how completely different it can be when the same puppet is worked by other man’s hands. By focussing on the one puppet you can deal with all the basics of manipulating and animating of a puppet character.

The keyword in working the puppet is learning to focus, so I began with a few basic exercises, firstly without voice, to show how to place movements with a beginning, a middle and an end in the space. For instance, the puppet looks up, sees me, reacts and then shows his reaction to the audience. This simple exercise initiated the wished for reaction and the dialogue had begun with the audience. Everyone in the group had the chance to do the exercise with the puppet and variations were added as everyone had their turn. This exercise was necessary before adding voice to the movement.

I then explained and demonstrated with the puppet the basics of lip sync. I alternated between using the puppet and my bare hand to show how the wrist moves and when the fingers close to achieve perfect lip sync with the voice. If you can learn to ‘talk’ perfectly with your hands then you can ‘talk’ perfectly with the puppet. Everyone was then asked to do an exercise with a simple text, for example, ‘To be or not to be’ and to use a voice which was different to their own natural voices. It was not necessary to do a ‘funny’ voice, because the exercise was aimed at trying to do perfect lip sync, no matter what the voice. The next step was to get everyone to sing a song with the puppet. Once the song was sung, then the song was broken down step by step, enhancing movements which gave the text more meaning. The results of this exercise were very good. It was astonishing to see how within a short period of time, the puppet singing its song took on moments of utter believability. Once again the keyword here was learning to focus.

After lunch, I split the group up into groups of two and three. Each group had to think of a sketch with the puppet where the voice was not used, but only movement. The audience had to guess what the situation was and who the characters were. Then each group presented their sketch, after which followed an immediate discussion about what was good and what did not work. It was important to learn why things also did not work and how you could go about correcting it. The exercise was repeated with newly reformed groups but this time adding voice.

At the end of the workshop, a presentation was given to a small audience to show something of the work process. Considering that it was only a one day workshop, I felt that the group had achieved wonderful results in what was a very congenial atmosphere. It was, all in all, a most fulfilling day.

NevilleTranter