I did two lipsynching tasks. The first was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen and the second was Common People by Pulp. These tasks has helped me understand the problems that I will come across when lipsynching in future.
There were several things that went well. With Bohemian Rhapsody, the people that were in the video were comfortable being in front of the camera. This made the whole process much easier when it came to editing because everyone was pronouncing the words properly and having fun with it. This also made the footage much more fun to watch because everyone was looking at the camera and not looking down reading the words.
There was some room for improvement in Bohemian Rhapsody. The main one being that in the line 'Galileo' there was overlapping which made it much harder to edit and showed that we didn't really listen to the music properly. If we had, then we would have had two people saying 'Galileo' directly after one another, the shot would have been in sync.
In the Commom People lipsynching task, the main problem I had was people being comfortable in front of the camera. I, on the one hand, was perfectly fine singing in fornt of the camera. However my partner didn't enjoy it as much and the fact that he wasn't as comfortable really showed when it came to editing as there was quite a contrast.
Another problem that we had was the fact that although we were singing along sometimes we didn't really open our mouths to pronounce the words so when it came to lining up the footage with the track, it wasn't really in sync.
Advice that I would give my future self on effective lipsynching is to make sure that the person who is going to be singing in front of the camera is completely comfortable with being there otherwise when filming they won't really want to do it. I would also advise the people that are filming to be singing along with the person so that they can encourage them. This will help them relax and you'll have much better footage to work with when it comes to editing.
Finally, I would also advise my future self to film a vast range of shots not just of your actor singing along to the track but of other things for example scenery as this will give you something to cutaway to and prevent long takes of the same shot, which is very boring to watch.
Peace,
Maria :)
