How to Make Replacement Mouths with Film Negatives

In Aardman’s Stop Motion 2 course, we’re learning lip sync. We have a sticker pack of 16 basic mouth shapes, which is a great start, but feels a little unsatisfying. So I embarked on some R&D to figure out how to make my own.

First, I took a video of myself reading the slowly reading my text, making sure to exaggerate the mouth shapes.

Second, I airdropped the video to my laptop, and traced each mouth shape onto a piece of white paper.

Third, I made the lip shapes & mouth shapes into two separate vector files using Inkscape, and also made a “teeth” .png which I loaded into my Cricut software.

Fourth, I cut the mouth and lip shapes out onto film negatives, and the teeth onto white sticker labels.

Fifth, I painted the negatives with dab of red where I needed a tongue, and got a single brushstroke across all the lip shapes.

Last, let it dry, and assemble!