We've been practicing eye blinks and eye darts in class recently. The first blink is done traditionaly using light boxes and a program called monkey jam. Very basic, vanilla blinks and eye darts.
This dart was made using adobe flash cs3.
I've learnt alot from these classes. Turns out that people pay more attention to eyes than mouths. Sooo as long as you're showing the emotions through the eyes, your lipsyncing doesn't have to be 100% perfect, because the audience probably won't be paying much attention to the mouth anyway.
Also, we usually learn to draw in arcs when animating movements. When it comes to eyes however, we totally break the rules and try to make the pupils only follow straight lines instead of arcs.
My teacher gave us lots of notes from various animators, one being Kyle Balda, who has noted some very good points:
- Eye darts generally dart around within 10-20% of the eye
- Eye dart timing should not be even
- Eye darts are good for communicating subtle thinking emotion
- Very fast and poppy (no ease-in to stop) is the most effective
- Character thinking eye darts should not flow in one direction