Animation. (Flash?)

Cpgnition

I would like to animate a picture of someone's face in sync with recorded speech. The picture would be split in two at the person's mouth, and when they said something, their' upper head would move. (Like baby Ike from South Park.)

What would be the best way to go about this? I have very limited experience with Flash and Java. I own a PC and a Macbook. (I mention the Macbook because I think iLive 08 might have some way of pulling this off...not sure.)

I know the old Half Life games would just measure the volume of the audio, and then make the person's mouth move accordingly. Something like that would be great.

Any ideas are appreciated, thanks!

DrFrylock

I actually wrote code that did this exact thing. I had a sequence of something like 5 pictures, each with the mouth at a slightly different aperture. The code then played the audio and averaged the sample amplitude and then used that to pick the openness of the mouth. The trick was to make sure to edit the audio in Audacity a little bit to ensure that the silent bits were actually completely silent. This produced the best effect.

Took me a couple of hours in Java. About 200-300 lines of code if I recall right. Sadly, the code is long gone.

Jasconius

Well you can do it the code way or if you're only talking about a one time shot then it is very easy to do in Flash using keyframes, no code required.