FACS, Facial Anatomy, & Lipsync Training for Studios
Need to upskill your team in facial mechanics? I offer a series of Facial Action Coding System (FACS), facial anatomy, and lipsync courses designed for animators, modelers, technical artists, and researchers.
Courses range from two-hour intensives to multi-day workshops. Whether you’re a AAA studio starting a FACS-based pipeline, an indie group finding your footing, or a tech firm refining your facial animation approach, my trainings are flexible, actionable, and developed from years of collaboration with major animation studios, large tech firms, and small startups.
Workshop & training offerings by category
Across animation, performance capture, and expression tracking, the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is the shared language of facial expression. However, because FACS was originally designed for observational research, it can feel abstract and difficult to apply in production.
The following FACS courses and workshops bridge that gap by ditching the academic checklist approach and reframing how facial actions are understood and applied. Rather than describing expressions from surface observation, the focus is on defining them through shape, structure, and motion. Your team will learn the muscles, mechanics, and constraints that drive each action unit.
Whether you’re onboarding a new rigging team or getting art, tech, and mocap speaking the same language, these intensives serve as both production guides and long-term reference tools.
Studios reach out for FACS training when…
- They adopt a FACS-based pipeline, but shape interpretation varies across departments. Nobody can agree what lip tightener is supposed to look like, and cheek raiser is a mess.
- They're onboarding new artists into an established pipeline. They need incoming talent upskilled quickly, and nobody has time for a 500-page manual.
- Supervisors and directors keep flagging expressions as "off" but can't articulate why. Neither can the team.
- They're moving into higher-fidelity facial work and need to systematize their approach across characters, pipelines, and teams.
Explore the offerings below.
Click on each course to read more.
FACS Cram Session (2 hour standalone course)
FACS Cram Session overview
A 2-hour, high-density intensive on core FACS shapes and corresponding anatomy. Designed to save your team months of research and reference hunting. Built for long-term reference, alignment, and onboarding.
Available versions:
- FACS for mixed levels of stylized animation (e.g. Into the Spider-Verse)
- FACS for photorealistic characters
What your team walks away with
- A function-first breakdown of all FACS action units
- 380+ slides of visual content (photos, GIFs, and anatomical diagrams)
- 2-hour lecture + 30-minute Q&A
- Recording access
- Downloadable PDFs for your team to keep
Why studios choose the FACS Cram Session
When teams lack a standardized expression framework, miscommunication compounds quickly. Animators and riggers speak different languages, capture data gets lost in translation, and iteration cycles drag on.
The FACS Cram Session solves these problems by establishing organizational fluency. Teams leave with:
- A common vocabulary that reduces back-and-forth between animation, modeling, and rigging
- Canonical expression references that maintain consistency across pipelines
- Reduced onboarding time for new hires entering FACS-based workflows
- Shared competency across departments, reducing reliance on individual specialists
Whether you’re launching a new facial capture pipeline, scaling up production, or leveling up an existing team, this intensive gets everyone aligned. Fast.
Course Syllabus
Intro to FACS: Origins & Action Units
- So, what exactly is FACS?
- Action units (AUs) explained
- Key terms to keep in mind
- Tips & tricks for FACS self-study
Upper Face, Part I: The Eyebrows
- The principles of brow movements
- AU1 – inner brow raiser
- AU2 – outer brow raiser
- AU4 – brow lowerer, all 3 muscles deconstructed (corrugator supercilii, depressor supercilii, procerus)
- Brow shape & frontalis variation
- Occipitalis & frontalis dynamics
Upper Face Part II: The Eyes
- The effects of eye shape variation on expression perception
- AU5 – upper lid raiser
- AU6 – cheek raiser
- AU7 – lid tightener
- AU43 – eye closure
- AU45 – blink
Middle Face: The Nose & Nearby
- Revisiting the nasolabial furrow
- Intro to middle face actions
- AU9 – nose wrinkler
- AU10 – upper lip raiser
- AU11 – nasolabial furrow deepener
- AU38 – nostril dilator
- AU39 – nostril compressor
Lip Corner Movers: Raising & Lowering Illusions
- Smile-like actions
- AU12 – lip corner puller
- AU13 – sharp lip puller
- AU14 – dimpler
- AU20 (& AU21) – lip stretcher (& neck tightener)
- Lip depressors and lip depressor illusions
- AU15 – lip corner depressor
- AU16 – lower lip depressor
- AU17 – chin raiser
Lower Face: The Mouth & Below
- Dissecting the amalgam of complex mouth-based movements and below
- Intro to orbicularis oris & incisivus actions
- AU8 – lips toward each other
- AU18 – lip pucker
- AU22 – lip funneler
- AU23 – lip tightener (horizontal & vertical types)
- AU24 – lip presser
- AU28 – lips suck
- Differentiating forward projecting actions like pucker and funneler
The Jaw & Action Descriptors
- Jaw and remaining actions
- AU25 – lips parted **
- AU26 – jaw drop
- AU27 – mouth stretch
- Intro to action descriptors
- Tongue show
- Bite
- Blow
- Puff
- Suck
- Bulge
Fast Track to FACS (multiple sessions)
Fast Track to FACS Overview
Multiple lectures with a deeper look into FACS, combo shapes, and beyond. Designed to save your team months of research, reference hunting, and corrective planning. Built for long-term reference, alignment, and onboarding. Best for teams actively building or refining facial systems.
NOTE: Many studios choose to bundle Fast Track to FACS with the FACS Cram Session. The FACS Cram Session helps ease everyone into the material. Contact me for bundled course options.
What your team walks away with…
- A function-first breakdown of all FACS action units
- FACS combination formulas for emotions and everyday expressions
- 3 x 50-minute lectures (can be broken down into 2 or 4 lectures) + 30-minute Q&A
- 500+ slides of visual content (photos, GIFs, and anatomical diagrams)
- Recording access
- Downloadable PDFs for your team to keep
Why studios choose Fast Track to FACS
A shared FACS vocabulary is only the beginning. The real production challenge is knowing how actions interact, what correctives to prioritize, and which combinations get you the expressivity you need for complex expressions and emotions.
Fast Track to FACS moves teams from foundational knowledge to applied expertise. Teams leave with:
- Fluency in key FACS action unit combinations and how they map to recognizable expressions
- A working framework for emotions and the FACS combinations they often correlate with
- The ability to evaluate whether captured or animated expressions are anatomically and psychologically coherent
- Shared criteria for directing and approving complex facial performances across departments
Whether you’re pushing the emotional range of your characters, refining a facial capture pipeline, or building a team that can evaluate performance at a nuanced level, Fast Track to FACS takes the foundation further.
Course Syllabus
Intro to FACS: Origins & Action Units
- So, what exactly is FACS?
- Action units (AUs) explained
- Key terms to keep in mind
- Tips & tricks for FACS self-study
Upper Face, Part I: The Eyebrows
- The principles of brow movements
- AU1 – inner brow raiser
- AU2 – outer brow raiser
- AU4 – brow lowerer, all 3 muscles deconstructed (corrugator supercilii, depressor supercilii, procerus)
- Brow combinations & their emotional associations
- The effects of brow shape variation on expression perception
- Wrinkle pattern & wrinkle diversity
- Occipitalis & frontalis dynamics
Upper Face, Part II
- The basic eye actions
- AU5 – upper lid raiser
- AU6 – cheek raiser
- AU7 – lid tightener
- AU43 – eye closure
- AU45 – blink
- Emotional and communicative meaning of different eye action combinations
- Eye shapes and how they may affect the look of eye-based expressions
- Changes associated with gaze and complex eye anatomy
Middle Face: The Nose & Nearby
- Movements of the nose, upper lip, and nasolabial area
- AU9 – nose wrinkler
- AU10 – upper lip raiser
- AU11 – nasolabial furrow deepener
- AU38 – nostril dilator
- AU39 – nostril compressor
- Key interactions between expressions of the middle face and expressions of the upper and lower face
- The role of middle face expressions in laughter, pain, disgust, and sadness
Lower face, Part I: The Mouth & Below
- Dissecting the amalgam of complex mouth-based movements and below
- Lip corner elevators (smile-like actions)
- AU12 – lip corner puller
- AU13 – sharp lip puller
- AU14 – dimpler (z-axis & y-axis types)
- AU20 (& AU21) – lip stretcher (& neck tightener)
- Reviewing common combination shapes and properties of those combinations
- Lip depressors and lip depressor illusions
- AU15 – lip corner depressor
- AU16 – lower lip depressor
- AU17 – chin raiser
Lower Face, Part II:
- Intro to orbicularis oris & incisivus actions
- AU8 – lips toward each other
- AU18 – lip pucker
- AU22 – lip funneler
- AU23 – lip tightener (horizontal & vertical types)
- AU24 – lip presser
- AU28 – lips suck
- AU25 – lips parted **
- AU26 – jaw drop
- AU27 – mouth stretch
- Demonstrating the effect of jaw position on other lower face actions
- Differentiating forward projecting actions like pucker and funneler
- Calling out interactions between lower face expressions and speech
- Intro to action descriptors: tongue show, bite, blow, puff, suck, bulge
Intro to Emotions
- Defining critical shape combinations for emotion and everyday expressions
- Reviewing basic emotion theory (BET), criticisms around BET, and
complementary research - Dissecting emotion blends
FACS & Facial Diversity (multiple sessions)
FACS & Facial Diversity Overview
This series contains dense material rooted in emerging anatomical research. FACS & Facial Diversity focuses on structure interaction, facial variation, and how FACS plays into it all. It is strongly recommended to take the FACS Cram Session and/or Fast Track to FACS before diving into this series.
Best for teams pushing the boundaries of realism.
Book a meeting with me to learn more.
Looking for more than training? See consulting options here.
Lipsync is more than a 1:1 mapping of sounds to shapes. It’s a coordinated system of articulatory mechanics, linguistic context, and anatomical constraints. Move past oversimplified viseme charts and embrace the modularity of speech with function-first breakdowns. I teach teams the underlying logic of speech articulation and how to use that knowledge to build dynamic shape sets, evaluation systems, and production pipelines.
Studios reach out for lipsync training when…
- Their automated or AI-driven lipsync looks uncanny and no one on the team can articulate why or how to fix it.
- They're building a new speech pipeline and don't know how to structure a scalable shape set.
- They have an audio-to-face pipeline but can't reliably refine or QA the output.
- They need standardized metrics and benchmarks to evaluate lipsync quality across their pipeline.
Explore the offering below.
Click on the course to read more.
All About Lipsync
All About Lipsync overview
All About Lipsync is a 2.5-hour deep dive into speech mechanics. The course begins with articulation fundamentals and builds toward customizable, anatomy-driven FACS blendshape formulas. You’ll learn which visual features are essential to each sound and how to leverage that information to develop in-house systems and strategies for high-fidelity performance refinement.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to lip sync. Rather than relying on generic phoneme-to-viseme mappings, this course focuses on the underlying logic of speech and articulation, enabling you to adapt your approach to different rigs, styles, and performance contexts. Human speech is complex, and All About Lipsync equips you to work with that complexity through modular strategies that leave room for emotion, stylization, and situational nuance.
What your team walks away with
- A foundation in phonetics and articulation mechanics
- Insight into flexible FACS & blendshape-based viseme building strategies
- 2.5 hour lecture + 30-minute Q&A
- 300+ slides of viseme strategies, references, & blendshape formulas
- PDF copies of slides for your team to keep
- Recording access
Why studios choose All About Lipsync
When teams adopt automated or AI-driven lipsync, the output rarely works out of the box, and most teams don’t have the framework to diagnose why. Quality becomes inconsistent, refinement stalls, and there’s no shared rubric for what needs to change.
All About Lipsync solves these problems by giving teams the technical foundation to evaluate and refine speech output. Teams leave with:
- A standardized framework for phonemes and visemes that makes pipeline output legible and correctable
- Modular FACS blendshape formulas for refining automated results across characters
- The ability to identify where an AI or audio-to-face pipeline is breaking down
- Shared benchmarks for evaluating lipsync quality from artists through supervisors
Whether you’re integrating a new audio-to-face system, troubleshooting an existing automated pipeline, or building the internal expertise to QA speech output consistently, All About Lipsync gives your team the tools to take control. Fast.
Course Syllabus
Intro to basic phonetics
- What is phonetics?
- What is a phoneme vs. a grapheme vs. a viseme?
Intro to consonants, important features, & strategic viseme groupings
- What is a consonant?
- Consonants classifications & how to assess primary consonant features from IPA charts
- What are the viseme categories for consonants?
- Intro to the Core Viseme Principles
- What consonants should we prioritize & why?
- How to leverage phonemic features to create variable phoneme-to-viseme groupings
Viseme groups & blendshape ingredients
- Core viseme groups
- How to not confuse graphemes from phonemes
- “Rules” for each group
- How to build each shape
- How to NOT build each shape
Intro to vowels, important features, & strategic viseme groupings
- What is a vowel?
- Vowel classifications & how to assess primary vowel features from IPA charts
- What are the viseme categories for vowels?
- What vowels should we prioritize & why?
- How to build rounded vowel shapes
- How to build widened vowels shapes
- How to build relaxed vowels shapes
Integrating viseme strategies with emotional contexts
- Reshaping your views of emotional speech
- FACS-based action unit formulas for surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, & happiness
Critical FACS combinations for speech
- Breaking down rounding shape ingredients
- Visual references and breakdowns of key FACS & anatomy combinations
- Lip presser & other actions that assist in increasing lip compression
The importance of relative shape contrast
- Rounding vs. spreading neighbors
- Stepping away from ideas of absolute position and embracing relative position thinking
- Visual example walkthrough
Looking for more than training? See consulting options here.
Bespoke training & workshops
From custom FACS for creatures and animals to the psychology of facial expression, if it’s about the face, we can make it happen.
NOTE: For animal FACS, I currently have curated documentation and lectures for capuchins and chimpanzees. Orangutans are in progress.
Testimonials
Mark Flanagan
Animation Education & Training Manager
Workshops with Epic Games & Netflix
I’ve had the great privilege of working with Melinda at my last 2 companies, Netflix and Epic Games. I have no hesitation in recommending her to anyone wanting to increase their knowledge, understanding, and application of facial expressions, in particular FACS (Facial Action Coding System).
There is simply no expert in the subject who I know of with more passion, dedication and intellectual curiosity. She combines this with a talent for teaching, and a gift for explaining via personal demonstration. Whether as a consultant, or a lecturer the value that she brings to any company or project is extraordinary, and I’m certain that I will be working with her again in the future. If you need to know about FACS, she is the number 1 “Goto” person in the world!
Shannon Thomas
Artist Supervisor
Workshops with Blizzard
Melinda Ozel’s knowledge of FACS is exceptional, and her classes are the best I’ve ever seen on this subject. Where she truly excels is the level at which she understands facial anatomy and expressions, how and why each shape fires, combines or breaks, but also what tone or emotion they are to convey.
Of all the the classes I’ve seen on this subject none have ever married the technical aspects with this level of artistic execution, nor explained it so clearly, enthusiastically and thoroughly as Melinda has. From the beginner level all the way to the most senior artists, I’ve witnessed everyone learn and improve from her detailed instruction. If you are seeking to learn or level up your team, I cannot recommend her enough.
Josh Dicarlo
Character Technology Director
Workshop with Insomniac Games
I’ve had the privilege of hosting one of Melinda’s Studio talks for our character development teams at Insomniac Games and I can assure you will not be disappointed! Her talks are jam packed with goods for both the novice and the professional. Highly recommend checking this out.
Whether you’re an animator trying to craft more believable performance, a character artist or TD trying to create more plausible characters or rigs, an ML engineer trying to qualitatively evaluate your research against its anatomical basis, or a supervisor / director trying to help your team squeeze every last bit of realism out of an on screen performance – there is something in this talk for you.
Holly Price
Character TD
Workshop with undisclosed studio
Melinda joined us for an incredible 2-hour FACS Cram session last month and it was one of the most informative training sessions I have ever attended! Melinda is highly skilled at presenting potentially complex information in an engaging and clear manner. Our team were left feeling educated and excited to delve deeper into FACS!
I can’t recommend Melinda’s presentation services, or plethora of exhaustive and in-depth information on her website highly enough. Don’t hesitate to contact Melinda if you are looking for any FACS training – she is an absolute pleasure to work with and a huge asset to any team education!
About the instructor
Hi! I’m Melinda, a consultant and educator on all things face-related. I specialize in facial expressions, FACS, and facial anatomy. My background in faces originated in academia, migrated to tech, and now lives in the space between art, science, and technology.
I apply my expression expertise to a range of industries (film, game, tech, etc.) and products/media (Emoji, AR/VR face tracking, AAA game characters, photoreal animals, AI, deepfake technologies, etc.). If it has a face, you’re in the right place.
Explore my multidisciplinary project history.
Film & 3D Characters
- Here – AI Facial Expression Consultant with Metaphysic (film, credited)
- Watch the Skies – AI-based Lipsync Expert (film, credited)
- Jane, Apple+ TV – Primate Expression Consultant (show, credited)
- Gigi & Nate – Primate Expression Consultant (film, uncredited)
- Notorious B.I.G. HyperModel by Hyperreal – Expression Researcher
VR & Face Tracking Tech
- Meta Quest Pro, face tracking – Expression Researcher & Expression Data Specialist
- System and method for applying an expression to an avatar (patent 10970907) – Co-inventor
- Systems and methods for improving animation of computer-generated avatars (patent 11270487) – Co-inventor
- Systems and methods for improving animation of computer-generated avatars (patent 11468616) – Co-inventor
- Oculus LipSync – Expression Researcher
Product Design
- Facebook Care reaction – Emoji Expression Consultant
- Facebook Emoji Sets – Emoji Expression Consultant
- Facebook Newsfeed Reactions – Emoji Expression Consultant
- Facebook Feeling/Activity – Emoji Expression Consultant