Oh my gosh, what a great question to get in my inbox! Thanks for writing in!

As for lip assignment.... ugh. I feel your pain! To be honest the real secret is “keep doing it until you get better” but tips I can think of off the top of my head to do it better/faster are:

Work with a mirror in a comfortable spot so you can say the words out loud and see your own mouth shape easily. Have your mouth chart up next to the mirror so you can compare your mouth to the chart mouths  (spread them out if it’s more than one page!) at a glance.

If you’re not sure what shape your mouth is making try to over-emphasize the word like crazy and “feel” what shape your mouth is making.

If possible scrub through your audio at half speed sometimes to hear the individual sounds

Break up the work into smaller chunks! For example:

Let’s say the line is “Hello my name is Bob.”

Your timing sheet should have the frames of animation as your unit of measure. So do some rough timing of when each word/sound starts and stops in your track! You CAN use a stopwatch for this but personally I think what I describe below is much easier.

I don’t know what you’re working with, but let’s say you have an MP3 of your audio track (or you can extract an mp3 from your animatic). Do that, and then open it in a program like Audacity (which is free) or a video editor that lets you count things in frames and shows waveform data.

If you look at the audio as a waveform you can zoom in and easily find the spots where the sounds happen! So for my imaginary “hello my name is Bob.” assignment, unless the file has tons of music or other voices in it, you can look at the waveform, and the first spike in the track will be when the word “hello” starts being said. When the spike of activity ends, they’re done saying hello. Second spike is “my”, etc...

So make some marks on those rows of your sheet, to indicate where each word starts and stops (or make notes on paper for yourself but tbh it’s best to mark up the sheet itself!). Fill in all the spots between sounds with the letter or number your team is using to represent the closed mouth shape. You may have to tweak this later to get this just right, but as a starting point it will help you identify when there IS and ISN’T sound.

Then, on the first row of each word, on the margins or on the side (wherever you’ve got free space) write the word phonetically - pay attention to any weird accent your character may have! Do they say ah-lum-in-um or a-loo-min-e-um?  Do they say “Helloooooooooooooo” in a drawn out way or “Hello!” in a fast way?

Then I’m afraid it’s just listening carefully to the track - scrubbing the spiked zones to identify what frame number it is when the H sound ends and E sound begins, E ends and L begins, L ends and O starts, etc etc.

Got a clip of Discord saying "Now if you'll excuse me, I have some chaos to wreak!" off youtube and cut the dialogue from the visual track so I can try animating it myself.  Made a short 9 frame storyboard that kinda covers his movement but didn't do anything past that.

I should take that clip into Amadeus Pro and make the exposure sheet shouldn't I?