The animation had a lot of talking parts in, so I needed to record the voices for my characters. To do this I used the voice recorder built in to my laptop. This isn't the greatest way to record things because the quality isn't that good but I would using Adobe Soundbooth after to clean up the sounds. The male voice is my own and the other is by a women I know. I didn't try and sound to much like a news presenter as I wanted it to sound like a authentic young Essex accent. This is probably something you wouldn't here on a news program!
The mastering was done with Soundbooth. Here I exported my windows Audio file and cleaned it up by first cropping the ends and then using a process that removes clicks and pops and also rumbles or other foreign sounds. At times I needed to manually take out small discrepancies as the software didn't do it automatically. Once finished I converted them into WAV files so they could be used in Max.
The tricky part was to sync the sounds with the lips of my characters. I did this by importing the sound file into the Curve editor in Max and positioning it on to the frame I wanted it to start from . I then used the wave to determine if the mouth should be open or closed. I used the 'Set key frame' button to set the lips of my character. I also used my own mouth as a guide to shape the characters mouth, by saying the lines out loud I could mimic my own mouth. This got a bit tedious at times because it took a while to set each lip, but total reality wasn't what I was looking for so it didn't have to be spot on. To make life simpler I added helpers to the mouth shape so that I could move the four sides of the mouth with ease.
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