Mouthing off: Lady is a Tramp

Quirky, Hilarious 3D Animation of a Floating, Singing Mouth

Using the recorded movement of their producer’s singing mouth, the creative team at Dvein created this quirky 3D animation. After capturing the mouth, they generated the body texture from real photos and used the movement of the mouth to generate a 3D rig- transmitting the movement of the mouth onto the body.

‘We thought it’d be interesting to mix the mouth with animation, but how to bring it to life? ’ co-director of Dvein, Teo Guillem, said. ‘Singing made all the sense.’

However, creating the mouth tracking was no easy feat, and it was a laborious task to match the real textures with the rest of the elements. ‘It’s not very complex technically,’ he added, ‘but very time consuming indeed. It’s like an artisanal work.’

We asked Teo more about the ongoing project:

The Plus: Any particular reason for choosing the song Lady is a Tramp?
Teo Guillem: Marga chose it. It was a song she was obsessed with at the time, humming it every minute. So when I said to her “Sing something!”- this was the first thing that came to her head.

TP: Is this going to be part of a wider project?
TG: Well, we have more mouths shot and the idea is to bring them to life sooner or later. We don’t know exactly when or which format will they be, but definitively there’s something going on.

TP: What are you working on now/next?
TG: We are finishing a personal project that we’ve been working on for the past few months. We hope it’s going to see the light before 2015. And we’re also working on commercial projects too – we have to make a living as well!