Mouth

I mostly used the mouths from www.animationtoolkit.co.uk  , which now come pre cut on the sticker paper.  Mine did not and so I cut out a lot of small pieces…haha.  I really like the set, but found that I wanted to have a few more shapes.  To be honest they probably weren’t really necessary.  I have been messing around with a program called Anime Studio Pro and found it a perfect resource for what I needed with these mouths.  The program is mainly for doing hybrid 2D animation, where you use bones and layer rigging to manipulate vector art.  Here is how I made some extra shapes:

1) I scanned the animationtoolkit mouth sheet into the computer and loaded it as a layer in Anime Studio (the shapes on the left are the scanned ones)

2) In Anime Studio I made a mouth rig based on the scanned shapes.  It’s basically using layers and a mask.  There are 4 layers: upper teeth, lower teeth, tongue, and mouth.  Once the rig is made I can then move the points around and make any shape I want.  In the picture each mouth is a full version of the mouth rig.  You can see in the layers listed at the bottom right, they are just duplicates.  I duplicated them so when I render out the jpg frame and print I will have a few copies to cut out.  I printed on regular inkjet sticker paper.  In the future I may make my own full set of mouths from scratch using this technique.

Here is a pic of the shapes being used to animate a scene:

I made a simple video that shows a bit better on how I accomplished it: