THE FUTURE OF ANIMATION?
Earlier this year, The Simpsons used animation software from Adobe to incorporate a live segment into an episode. During the segment, fans of the show called in and asked unscripted questions to Homer, who answered – while animated – in real-time.
This was done using a piece of still-in-development software called Adobe Character Animator. Character Animator is included with current versions of After Effects, but launches as a standalone program. It uses web-cam point tracking to map facial movements in real-time. Mouth movements are translated to pre-built shapes, that change and move with the action of the actor. Other gestures, such as blinking or body movements can either be tracked live or mapped to buttons. When a button is pressed, the corresponding gesture is made.
For the segment on The Simpsons, Homer’s voice actor (Dan Castellaneta) responded to questions will being tracked by a camera monitoring his facial movements. Other gestures were controlled by the episode director using a keyboard.
While the humor is a bit hit-or-miss, the technology and execution are certainly impressive. However, the most interesting thing about this may be that the tools used to do so are readily available and accessible. We have Character Animator installed on the computers in the Marts studio and anyone with a Creative Cloud subscription can download it. This is a prime example of the specialized tools of video production and animation becoming increasingly democratized.
You can read more about the Simpsons live animation segment over at Cartoon Brew. Since this is a specialized animation tool, we aren’t covering it in this class – but if you’re interested in learning how to use it, allow me to make a shameless plug for next semester’s Film/Media Studies Production Practicum, which will be focused on animation. We’ll be using After Effects, Character Animator, Illustrator, Photoshop, and even more esoteric tools such as stop-motion.