Now, I can fine tune this a tiny bit more especially with that first word “well”. As we played it, you might have noticed a little disconnect between what his mouth shape was and the word he was making because he had that long drawn out “L” at the end. So, what I can do is take advantage of one other feature where I can pick out the mouth shapes that I would like to use. Let me go to the first one, he is saying the world “well” here, so, if you say that to yourself and watch your own mouth shape. You can see that your mouth should not probably be opened as much when you are starting to make that kind of a sound.

What I am going to do to fix this is I am going to take advantage of a special feature of the kinds of symbols we can use out of our library. We have been using movie clip symbols. What I am going to do is switch this to what is called a “Graphic Symbol”. The graphic symbol will allow me to control the playback of the animated symbols we have here. I have a choice of setting them up to loop, play a single time through, or only show a single frame and that is what I am going to make use of here. By choosing single frame, I can pick out which frame I want to show. And if I go to frame 14, you can find that up by looking inside the mouth’s animated file.

That is a much better shape for the word “well”. The mouth is much more closed and it is a good way to start that word out. Now, I am going to do the same thing since this is drawn out. I am going to put a mouth shape in for the E sound and for the L sound that pronounce after this and I will just make additional changes using my key frames to make the settings and going down to my mouth properties and setting the frame to a value that will work good for it. Now with the E sound, his mouth should be much more open. So, I am going back to frame 1 and you can see, there he is starting to say, “Well” and we need an L sound.

I will add another key frame for that. And this time I am looking for something around frame 8. Now, there we go. His tongue is on top of his mouth and he is kind of saying that “Well” word. Let us see how that affects our animation. I will test our movie once more.

[Demo]

It makes a surprising difference. With that change, we have made it look like our dad character is saying exactly what the sound file says.