“We had Homer speaking, all the dialogue mouths, the layout of the room and the animation of Homer raising his arms, turning side to side, eye blinks, et cetera. “One of our animation directors, Eric Koenig, set up the animation stems that would be used,” said Silverman.
This was done in Photoshop by The Simpsons animation team, then translated to Character Animator. Of course, before the broadcast, the animatable pieces had to be assembled. So they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who knew how the character sounded and worked.” “I’m the guy who invented a lot of the rules for Homer they always look to me as a Homer expert. So, why was Silverman tasked with pressing the buttons? “They wanted me to work the animation because of my familiarity,” the director, who has worked on the show almost from day one, acknowledged. Adobe also implemented a way to send the Character Animator output directly as a video signal via SDI and enable the live broadcast. We knew that good lip sync would be a priority so a lot of work went into adjusting our lip sync algorithm so the end result would be broadcast quality.” See Also: Adobe Character Animator Lets You Animate With Your Face Making animationĭuring the live segment – recorded twice for west and east coast viewers of the show – Castellaneta was situated in an isolated sound booth at the Fox Sports facility listening and responding to callers while Silverman was called upon to operate the extra animation with a custom XKEYS keypad device that included printed animated Homer thumbnail icons. “To ensure that the Simpsons team was using a very stable product,” said Simons, “we created a new branch of Preview 4 called ‘Springfield’ with the version number starting at x847 because that’s the price Maggie rings up in the show’s intro.
#Character animator software software#
But The Simpsons team were able to work with Fox Sports to produce a prototype Homer puppet in the software that convinced everyone that a live Simpsons segment would be possible. Interestingly, when The Simpsons team were looking to adopt Character Animator for the live segment, the tool was at the time, and still is, in preview release form (currently Preview 4). In short, if you create mouth shapes in Photoshop or Illustrator and tag them appropriately in Character Animator, you can animate your mouth by simply talking into the microphone.” We support a total of 11 visemes, but we recognize many more (60+) phonemes. In the ‘map’ example, the ‘m’ and ‘p’ phonemes can both be represented by the same viseme. The last step would be displaying what we’re calling ‘visemes’. “If you take the word ‘map’,” explained Adobe’s David Simons, “each letter in the word would be an individual phoneme.
#Character animator software series#
The lip sync part works by analyzing the audio input and converting this into a series of phonemes. This can be via keystrokes, but the real drawcard of the tool is the translation via webcam of user facial expressions to a 2D character and user dialogue driving lip sync.įacial animation was not used in the live Simpsons segment, but lip sync direct from Castellaneta’s performance was. Still a relatively new feature in After Effects CC, Character Animator is designed to animate layered 2D characters made in Photoshop CC or Illustrator CC by transferring real human actions into animated form. That led to an investigation of Adobe Character Animator. That is, until The Simpsons team observed how the Fox Sports on-air graphics division was implementing the live manipulation of its robot mascot, Cleatus. He came from Second City in Chicago, where comedians like Bill Murray and John Belushi had also performed.” However, it was not so clear what technology could be used to produce a live broadcast. “We all know that Dan is a great improv guy. The idea for a live-animated segment had been around for several years, according to Silverman, who noted that the idea was to take advantage of Castellaneta’s ad-libbing skills.
0 kommentar(er)
