Usually at night but now that the older two are teenagers that's suddenly when they want to have really in-depth conversations with me xD but yeh that's the major reason it progresses so incredibly slowly.

I have played with shapekey phonemes briefly, think if I can be bothered making any these days (currently I can't but may change my mind down the line XD) I'd use poses as rigify's face rig is pretty good.

I haven't otherwise done a lot with dialogue yet, so far only had to do some timing for a song in a project that I helped my sister with.  She does 2d anim (as a hobby) and had a project where the camera was in first person mode and she was unsure how to move the scene around in a slightly complicated shot so I offered to block it for her, and literally used blocks which she then drew over the top of (except for the block coming down the stairs with the camera attached, I just needed to know how tall the first person character was and you otherwise never see anything except his arms).  Anyway I used markers to work the timing out, maybe that's something like what you're talking about?

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I don't know if you can see them at the bottom of the top left panel? XD

Anyway I should probably also make it clear that I have never worked in industry and I have no idea how things are supposed to be done or even what things are called half the time, everything I know how to do is based on when I needed/wanted to do something and I would bumble around til I figured it out or if I couldn't figure it out then I would scour the internet and then half the time do my own thing anyway with a slightly better idea after having read a chunk of internet about it, so me knowing exactly what you're talking about and not realising it or having no idea what you're talking about is equally likely :)

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