If you’re a stop-motion Lego filmmaker who thinks that adding moving mouths in post-production is cheating (or too time-consuming) then over on Minifigs.me you’ll want to grab a set of these Minifig heads featuring phonetic mouth poses that can be swapped in while you’re animating.
The site actually worked with professional animators to help develop the shapes of the mouths on these 12 Minifig heads that each represent a specific sound made when talking. As a movie is being animated frame-by-frame, the animator can replace a character’s head with whichever one of these represents the word or sound they should be speaking at that moment.
Does it sound tedious? Yes. Is it actually tedious? Also yes. However, animating the characters’ mouths in-camera is still faster and cheaper than doing it during post-production—and it looks more authentic. The $40 set also includes three labeled display blocks for keeping the set organized by sound, but the back of the heads are labeled too so there’s no actual risk of mixing them up. [Minifigs.me via Brick Fanatics]