So, you want your brick minifigs to talk?  It is easy with a bit of ingenuity, Lip Sync Pro and Stop Motion Pro!

Making these tiny figures talk has always been a challenge, the only movement you can really do on the heads is move them left to right.

We put our minds to it and came up with this idea, feel free to try it out yourself.

Step 1. Create a series of mouth shapes

In Lip Sync Pro, we have a set of mouths called "Simple set".  This is a set of mouths that cover most of the dialog mouth shapes, certainly enough to give the illusion that a brick minifig is talking.

We colored the background of these yellow and printed them out. You can download and print out your own copy using this PDF.  Make sure you have the print set to 100%

Each strip is 40mm long, 5mm high ( 1.57 inches by .2 of an inch).  5mm (.2 inch) at the end of each strip is white.

Step 2.  Cut up the replacement mouths

Wash your hands.  The strips are very small and any dirt will show up!

Cut out the replacement mouths.  Notice how the PDF has a black strip on the left hand side, cut right through to this, the white part of the paper is the tab you will use to stick the paper together with in the next step.

Step 3.  Sticky tack the paper tubes

Use a small ball of sticky tack (Blu tack, Poster putty etc) on the white tab end of the paper face strips.  

Step 4. Wrap

Wrap the paper face strips around a minifig head.  Try and wrap so they are tight, but still loose enough so you can remove them easily but not so loose they fall down.

Gently pull each face off and place to the side.

Step 5.  Do your lipsync and start filming!

Go to our tutorial on using Lip Sync Pro, you will be using the same example as we have in the video at the top of this page.  Export a movie from Lip Sync Pro and bring it into the Stop Motion Pro Rotoscope (Action! Plus editions and above). 
If you have SMP Action!  You can print out the "X sheet" and use it as a guide while you film.  This will tell you which mouth shape to use while animating.

Note the Onionskin tool in SMP is perfect for ensuring the faces line up exactly when filming.

What to do next...

Make your own mouth set, create blinks and other emotions for the minifigs.  You can make the faces as complex as you like.

Below you can see how the Lip Sync Pro movie appears in the Stop Motion Pro Rotoscope.  The Audio file is also required, and added to the Audio sync tool.  It is a good idea to match the FPS (frames per second) rate in Stop Motion Pro to the frame rate used in Lip Sync Pro.