Lip Synching and walk cycle.

This is actually a link to my first year animation. It demonstrates my attempt at a walk cycle and lip synching. It's not particularly great but does what it says on the tin.
This was was done on Toon Boom V.3:


About lip synching:
Lip synching on toon boom was fairly easily done. It was a case of uploading the sound onto the software and drawing the letter recommended for each vowel/sound. Lip synching is done on the theory that each word you speak has many different shapes and sounds. So to break it down for animators they broke the shapes down into letter like; A,E,O,V and so on, these are common shapes the mouth uses when speaking and so the basics are covered.
But there is more to lip synching than just shapes. There is also expression, emotion and atmosphere and characteristics. Such as anger, when something is said in anger that sentence tend to get more tense and aggressive and is very different from a happy one. If a character has a stutter or a lisp it makes it more difficult to animate as you have to animate both the stutter/lips as well as the sentence.
So you can see that it perhaps isn't the easier job to do but toon boom helps in making the process easier.

Walking:
Walk cycles, tedious and annoying at times but still has to be done in order to create a realistic walk. There are several frames in a walk cycle and to miss even on makes the walk unrealistic and jumpy. You can tell from a few scenes in my own animation how it looks when even one is missed out. Another point is that you dont move the figure across the screen, in fact you keep it still, moving on the spot. But what you do move is in fact the back ground, this gives the impression of a moving figure.