[Music] [Dave Werner] My name is Dave Werner. I am a designer for Adobe, been with Adobe for about 11 years. And today, I'm going to be talking about Character Animator. Thank you. Yeah. Character Animator is a really fun program. It allows you to do all sorts of cool stuff with making animated characters and making the world of character animation more accessible to people. So there's a lot of different ways to get started with Adobe Character Animator. It allows anyone to animate through one of three different ways. So there's the web version, the desktop version... What? This is just perhaps the most boring thing I've seen in this entire conference. Okay. Excuse me. I'm trying to do a presentation here, Avocado. - What the heck are you... - You call this a presentation? A bunch of bullet points? Come on! You're talking about cartoons, animations. It's supposed to be fun. Well, I'm fun. I mean, I was at the Bash last night. I was having a good time. Come on. What're you talking about? Fun! Oh, yeah, were you that guy with some terrible dance moves while eating his weight in donuts. No. No. That wasn't me! I don't know what you're talking about. We have some footage from you last night. Let's roll back the footage. No. We don't have to do that. No. Wait. Oh, god. Oh, oh, oh... Okay. That's... Yeah, that's unfortunate.

Wow. And it just keeps going. Hmm. Yikes. Okay. That's... Oh, we ended on that frame. That's great. Yeah. I'm glad we got that. Okay. Yeah. Thanks a lot. - That's awesome. - I think my work here is done. Seeing how that helped me make that presentation, a bit more entertaining. Before I leave, you, sir, in the third row, fourth seat on the left, I know you paid me $2 extra for guacamole yesterday. That was my brother. You just need to sleep with one eye open. All right.

Oh, thank you.

So that's just a dumb thing to show that, like, animation catches your attention and characters immediately catch your attention. You can have a little talk... Cute talking Avocado and immediately it starts, you're interested. And what is this? And why is this talking to me? And what is it doing? It's just animation is a tool that allows us to communicate in so many interesting ways. The way the Character Animator works, it's performance capture animation. So you take a Photoshop or an Illustrator file and you name the layers a certain way, left eyebrow, right pupil, ah mouth shape, and then you can perform it with your own face and voice using a webcam. And there's actually multiple ways to get into Character Animator that I'll show you today, from very easy lightweight versions on the web to the full-fledged desktop experience. But yeah, I mean, character animation, it's a lot of fun and immediately kind of grabs your attention. So there's three ways now that you can get involved with Character Animator. In past, the one all the way on the right is the only one you had, which was Pro mode. And this is full Character Animator, if you have the Adobe all apps Creative Cloud plan, you already have access to this. It is a full desktop application. You can make your own custom characters, you can record and edit with frame by frame precision. This is kind of all the bells and whistles. But recently, we've opened up some other avenues to get into Character Animator. They're a little bit easier and more lightweight. So if that feels a little too intimidating, you can get started with some of these other ways. So Express, they showed this very briefly in the keynote on Tuesday where they showed like a little talking hotdog doing some stuff very briefly. But this is completely free. It's on the web. So you could do it from your mobile phone, on a Chromebook. It doesn't have to be any big download or anything like that. And you just record your voice, and then we automatically animate everything else. So I'll show you how this is done in a little bit, but it's very, very powerful, very cool. But it's an easy way to get started. And then if you feel like you want to do a little bit more, there's a free version of the desktop app too, called Starter mode. All you need is an Adobe ID. If you download Character Animator, Starter mode will be the only option available for you if you don't have the full Creative Cloud plan. If you do have the Creative Cloud plan, you still have access to Starter mode. So don't feel like you only get Pro mode if you've full apps plan. But this is a simpler version of Character Animator where it's a single timeline, one character, very simple. You record your face. You record your voice. And then you add little emotion triggers to say where you want your character to be happy or sad or angry or that sort of thing. It's a very easy step by step process. So the way I recommend people now is try Express first. Give that a try. See how it works. And if you feel like there's limitations there, hey, I want to do more with the emotions or add more characters or something like that, you can slowly graduate to Starter mode and then graduate to Pro mode. There's a pretty easy step-up process if you want to do that. Okay, so just like I said, I'm going to do a demo of Animate from audio now, the thing that they showed at the Keynote, and let me just bring it up here.

So to find it, it's a little bit hard to find someone before the conference was... Or before the talk was asking, like, yeah, I tried to find it, and it would, like, searched for cartoon hotdog, and I couldn't figure it out. That's okay. On the Express website, if you go to Plus, there's these things called Quick Actions, and this is the thing, like remove background, convert to GIF, all of that stuff, but one of these is called Animate from Audio. And so you go ahead and click on that, and that's going to take you into this. I had it set up over here. And basically, you can pick from a bunch of characters. I think we have, like, 75 characters or so. We're always adding new ones, so we've got, like, these new Halloween themed ones. We've got a little pumpkin there. He's cute. He's made by the same guy who made the avocado, so you can kind of see some similarities there, a skeleton, a headless horseman. This is great because the head moves over here, but the rest of the body's there, Jet, Witch, Wolfgang, all these different characters. But there's a lot of different options here that you can be, and it gives you a lot of different ideas of what's possible here. And there's that avocado if you want to make your own interruption of a talk at MAX, you can do that as well. So let's pick this Halloween themed character Jet. And then I can pick a background, so I'll pick like a spooky cemetery background, something like that. You could also upload your own custom image. You could choose your custom color. You could use a transparent background. We'll talk about that a little bit later. And then you've got all your sizes for social media. So if you're doing a reel on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever, you have that as an option. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and just record something really quick with this character. Actually, let's use Ash right here, and I can resize him, of course, reposition, whatever I want, move it around and then say, okay. Oh, and this little thing down here, enhanced speech. This is the exact same technology that they showed at the Keynote where they did it, and there was the woman talking outside with the band in the background. It was hard to hear her, and then they did this magic switch and everything sounded better. It's that exact same technology if you turn this on. It takes a little bit of extra processing time, so I'm not going to do it right now, but just to know, that's an option if you want your voice to sound really nice. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and record something here.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Adobe MAX, and I just have something to say. Okay. So we... What's happening now is it's generating all this stuff, animation on the cloud. So the character, we're going to get the lip sync, the head movements, the eye movements, arm movements, all these gestures, and it's automatically going to animate this character for us. So all we had to do was supply our voice. And you can also upload an audio file as well. So if you didn't want to record right there, or you have a friend who's got like a great cartoon voice or something like that, you could bring that, export it in here. There's a button that says browse. You do that, and it'll use that as your basis for all of the animation. So once this finishes generating, in a second here, hopefully, it's going to export it out, and we will get a preview of our animation. And let's see how this turns out. Okay. So let's see how this turned out. Hey, everyone, welcome to Adobe MAX, and I just have something to say. So that's great. Like, I just did that and the character's moving and acting and doing all this stuff, and each character's going to have their own sets of movements that they're doing. So some of them... Hands on hips, pointing, moving their head around, all sorts of stuff. Some are like the avocados, just a big floating shape. So it's going to act a little differently than others. But you have a bunch of options there. And then you can either just download the video or you can open it in Adobe Express and do more with it. So if you wanted to add text and images and video and all these extra stuff, you could do that. Actually, we've seen people make whole cartoons just by bringing multiple versions or variations of Animate from audio, and then they might flip it around and make it look like one character's talking to the other, that sort of thing. And you can make, like, your own little free cartoon, type of thing with that. And it's really powerful and really cool. So that's a look at Animate from audio. Okay. So let's get back to this.

I also want to point out there's another quick action that I helped work on that I think goes hand in hand with this, this called Caption video. This just came out in beta. So you might have to search a little bit for it on the Express homepage, but basically what it's going to allow you to do is take any video and it's going to automatically caption it for you. And so it's automatically going to give you all the words, everything showing up, and you then have a chance to change the style. We have a bunch of preset styles that you can use and decide what looks best to you, and then you can make edits to the text if you auto detect, didn't get it correct and be able to change that. So this really goes well hand in hand with the Animate from audio because so many people watch social media without the volume on. So you could record your Animate from audio, bring the video in here, upload it to caption video, get your captions, style it how you want and download it, and you're ready to go. So definitely check that out for this or any social media videos you do. It's a pretty powerful tool, and it's a lot of fun to use. Okay, so let's look at the tried and true desktop stuff that we've got here for Character Animator and what that looks like. So the big difference I was talking about Starter and Pro mode. So if you're in Starter mode, you'll see Starter in the upper right corner. And everyone who downloads Character Animator for the first time is going to be put into Starter mode. So you will see Starter in the upper right corner here. And this is the home screen, and we've got a bunch of different characters that you can choose from here or if this isn't enough, you can go to See More. You can also import custom puppets. If someone has made a puppet for you, if you made your own puppet, we'll talk about that a little bit later. But for now, I'm just going to pick this fox character here and bring this one in. And what it's going to allow me to do is immediately it's going to start doing the face tracking and the audio tracking. So as I move my head around and as I'm talking, this character is doing the same. And it's just doing... This is just a normal built-in webcam. You don't need any fancy depth sensing camera or anything like that. I think this character was actually made in Blender, and then the artist exported out the files to a PSD file and named them all and organized them all a certain way to make it work. Okay. Since that last singing one went so well, I'm going to try to do that again this time. And let me see what I can say this time. Okay. Let's try this.

Well, let me welcome everybody to the Wild Wild West. A state that's untouchable like Eliot Ness. The track hits your eardrum like a slug to your chest. Pack a vest for your Jimmy in the city of whoop. We in that Sunshine State where the bomb-ass hemp be. The state where you never find a dance floor empty. And... Okay, well, we'll just stop there. Okay. Wonderful.

Yeah, so we've got this performance, and it's on a very simple timeline where the character's kind of bobbing his head back and forth, not that interesting. Like, if I put this up on social media, people are going to get pretty bored of it in just a few minutes, right? There's not a lot of extra movement, just ahead bobbing back and forth isn't quite enough. But that's where these things come in over here. We call these triggers. And when you go over top of them, you'll see they change the emotion of an animation of the character. Basically, they're these extra animations that we can add. So if your character is embarrassed or happy or kind of sad, watery eyes, waving, little gestures, and things like that. So all of these are going to add some additional emotion to the character and look a little bit better. This one's my favorite, the dance.

That's a good one. I'm definitely going to use this one. So you've got all these as options. So what I can do is maybe at the beginning, the character waves. So I'm just going to drag this into my timeline down here, have the character wave. Whoops. Let's go right there. And I also have the opportunity to resize it and retime it. So if I say, okay, I only wave to this word, or maybe now they're a little bit happy about something, and maybe they gesture here. I can have them overlap a little bit.

Let's do, like, feeling a little sad, bashful, and, of course, well, that dance move in the end. Okay, I'm going to subject you to my terrible singing and rapping again, but here's how it looks. Let me welcome everybody to the Wild Wild West. A state that's untouchable like Eliot Ness. The track hits your eardrum like a slug to your chest. Pack a vest for your Jimmy in the city of whoop. We in that Sunshine State where the bomb-ass hemp be. The state where you never find a dance floor empty. And... Okay. Wonderful. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes. Beautiful.

Yeah. Yeah. Embarrassing. Okay. So this is great. So I've got a great project that I can then export out the video. Just use the share icon up here to export out in MP4 file that's ready to go. And I full control over, like, the position of my character, the background. There's a little icon here. You can choose from premade backgrounds or upload your own, and we also have different sizes. If you want to go to square, portrait, landscape, all that stuff. But then you might say, well, there's a little bit extra precision I want to do. I want to do some additional details. And the nice thing is that you can convert a Starter mode project to a Pro mode project. So if I just went up here and instead of Starter, I went to Pro, now I'm in the full Pro version, and you'll see this has a lot more options for me. So for example, every mouth shape that my character said shows up down here. I know it's super tiny on the screen, but every single letter and thing that was auto detected. So the way Character Animator does the voice module thing is it's looking for... It's listening. It's not looking for the jaw as much in your mouth. It's more listening to the sounds you're saying and hearing when you're saying, ah, eh, ooh, all of that stuff, and deciding what the right mouth is. But if, for example, I say this S mouth, I want that to actually be ah mouth. I can just right click it and go down to the ah, change it, and now the mouth is a little bit open. So you can extend certain of those mouth shapes, make them smaller, add ones, and whatever you want. Same thing with these triggers down here, so I've got my trigger, he's gesturing to the left right now, but if I right click this and go to sad instead or embarrassed or whatever, I have full control over that. And then you have a lot of other options too on how you record. So I think there's kind of a misconception when you're doing performance capture. Number one that you need a skin tight suit and ping pong balls all over you. You don't-- I mean, you could do that if you want to. But I wouldn't recommend it. But you can just do basic stand up here, and you can then record whatever you want with the red dots over here. So anything with the red dot over here means it's ready to record. Red means ready. And so right now, I've got all my red dots on, meaning it's looking for my face, my eye gaze, my lip sync, all of that. But what I can do is I'm going to press Command-click on this and turn them all off. And now nothing is being recorded right now. Nothing live, no live data is coming in. And instead, I'm just going to do my face. And now the only thing I'm worried about recording is my face. That's the only thing that's currently recording. Let me calibrate here to make it a little bit better. Okay. So now what I could do is actually fix a mistake or add an extra recording on top of everything. So if I press record here, maybe I just want to, like, move my head a little bit extra. So I'm going to-- Pack a vest for your Jimmy in the city of whoop. We in that Sunshine State where the bomb-ass hemp be-- Yeah. I'm sorry. I have to play this so many times. Okay. So what that's going to do is give me this extra take down here. So basically now I have two face takes. I have the original face take if I'm moving my head around. And now I have a second one where I moved my head a little bit more. Now if I play this back, normally, it's going to kind of jump from point A to point B. But we have these things called blend handles that allow you to blend multiple performances together. So it kind of goes smoothly from one head's position to the next. And then back into the original position like that. So the way I do things a lot is I'll kind of start with probably the audio is always where I start, get my character talking, and so I know what to react to. Here's where I kind of stagger back and act surprised or dance around or whatever. And then I'll slowly layer things on top of it, like here come the eyes or the different head movements or things like that over top of it just to make it come to life like that. So it's a very flexible program, allows you to do a lot of things.

But then a lot of people are going to say, okay, I like this, but I don't want to use any of your premade characters. I want to make my own characters. I want to do my own stuff. And that's totally possible too. And we have a lot of options for that. One easy way to get into character creation is this thing called Puppet Maker. It's the very first thing, this is only available in Pro mode right now. But if you click on this, this is going to give you basically a character creation system similar to Bitmoji or a video game character creator or something like that, where you have these characters in a certain style. And then you get to pick what hairstyle you want, what skin tone, all of that stuff, and very quickly make a character that looks like whatever you want. I personally like using this randomized button, which is going to show you just a bunch of options. Allright. Looking good now. Think I saw that person at MAX yesterday, okay, at the Bash.

So you get some interesting things, but this kind of shows you kind of what's possible. And the nice thing is though, if you don't like this style, that's okay because there's a ton of other styles that you can choose from. And we have all sorts of different things from like a claymation style to 3D to animate aliens, robots, all sorts of stuff. And they all had their own set of things you can customize. And the one really nice thing about this is when you're making a cartoon, you kind of want your characters to all look the same, right? The Simpsons all kind of had that same look and feel to them, right? And if you put instead the frog talking to the avocado out of the premade characters, those are different styles. They don't really mesh as well as this. But if you did something in Puppet Maker, you're going to get characters that kind of are able to look like the same. So here's-- This is maybe my main character, and this is the next door neighbor or something like that, and this is their friend at school. And you can slowly build up a cast of characters to make your cartoons with. So I think this is the easiest way to get started with that sort of thing. And then the nice thing is when you find a character that you really like, go ahead and click Generate. That's going to generate it out, and it's going to strip out all the parts that you don't need. So all those color selections and artwork selections that you didn't make, it takes that out of the original Photoshop file, and then here we've got our character now ready to go and looking pretty good. And you'll notice I've got all the same triggers as before, so I can make this character angry or embarrassed or sad or all the gestures and things. I don't think this one is the dance moves, unfortunately, although you could kind of go between some things and like, yeah, da-da-da, that sort of thing if you want to. I do this for a minimum of five minutes at my desk every morning.

Okay. So I was talking about how this is a PSD file. So behind the scenes, if I double-click on my character here, you'll see it looks a little weird here. Like, there's a lot going on, but basically, behind the scenes, this is just a character with, like, a head. So this is its head group, and everything in the head group, which is in the original Photoshop file, will move as I move my head. And because I named this head, H-E-A-D, it automatically gets tagged as a head over here when I import it into Character Animator. So if you make a really simple Photoshop file, it's just a circle and you call it head, then when you import in Character Animator and move your head around, the circle is also going to move with your head. When you name something like right eye or left eye, that is going to be considered an eye. And inside that, you're going to want your eyeball and pupil. And basically, the way Character Animator does eyes is the pupil stays inside the confines of the eyeball. So you have a big white eyeball, pupil in the middle when it moves, it's going to stay within that size of the eyeball. There's some hacks if you don't want it, if you like, like, big anime style eyes or things like that. There's ways around that, but in general, that's kind of the way you go. And then the mouth has a lot to it. So the mouth has-- You can do up to 14 different mouth shapes for your character. And there's a little reference on the side here that you can see to see all the different mouth shapes. And we do have references and mouth packs that you can use that I'll talk about a little bit later how to find those templates and everything. But, basically, we have PSD and AI files of mouth set. So if you don't want to spend your time creating all 14 mouths for your characters, you can download these, just drag these mouths into your Photoshop or Illustrator file, and you have a talking puppet ready to go. So there's a lot of resources like that to make it easy, and it's nice because if you already know Photoshop or Illustrator, you can just get started. You don't have to learn a different drawing program or anything like that to make this. Okay. Yeah. And then behind the scenes, like, if I select this character, a little PS or AI icon is going to show up down here, And if I click on that, it's going to open up Photoshop or Illustrator, and so you can see all the layers and all the groups. So that's the nice thing. Any of our example puppets, you can take them apart and see how they were made. So if you want to see how that avocado was made from earlier, you can do that. If you want to see how this character is made, you can do that. You can swap in your own artwork. You can change the logo on this t-shirt to your own company or brand or whatever. It's really flexible and really easy. And as soon as I make a change here, like, let's go to here, Baja heat was the logo here. I can just, like, change this. Let's just add, like, a color overlay or something like that to it. Something green. Let's just say something like that. I'm just going to rasterize this, flatten the layer a little bit, save this, go back to Character Animator, that change is automatically going to sync and show up here. So if I make a change to the hair or the shirt or whatever, I can do that, and my character's going to automatically update, which is pretty great. Okay. So that is what Starter and Pro mode look like. Okay. AI, this is a question that I got a lot at the booth down at the Creative Park for-- A lot of people asking about how could you use AI for Character Animator. That's kind of the hot topic, you know? If you took a shot every time they said AI during the Keynote, you'd be passed out on the alleyway, like, Contra Hall over there. But Firefly is really great. And I think particularly for Character Animator, it's the best for, like, background and foreground elements and props and things like that. I find that that's kind of a part where I want to have my characters and like a lot of different scenes and have cool things in front and behind them. But I think it's really great to be able to use it for that and just have these background plates and foreground elements. So for, like, for these trees, for example, I just did cartoon plants or something like that with basic solid background, and it would do that. I did the Remove Background tool, bring it in to a file into Character Animator or whatever Express or whatever I'm using, and it's great for kind of layering those different elements. You can use it for characters, but it's not automatic. You're going to have to do a little bit of Photoshop or Illustrator surgery to get the character working correctly. I tried this in my hotel room yesterday when I saw the vector to-- Text to vector thing they were showing in Illustrator. I think this works really well because here's a-- I just searched for cute frog character, something like that, and it did this. And the nice thing is it's breaking the character down into all these different layers and parts, and that's great for Character Animator because we really want separate parts. I want to be able to move the pupils on their own or have the head separated from the body and that sort of stuff. So it's kind of a mess here. I just see path group, path, path, path, so I have to kind of dig through it. And basically what I did was organize it a little bit. So I turned-- Isolated the eyes and said, this is the pupil. This is the eyeball. I had to make a blink state for the character when I close my eyes. I basically put all that stuff into a head. It only had one mouth shape, so I just made, like, I think three or four different mouth shapes to make it go up and down, kind of to create a simpler mouth, and then did the body after that. And then this is me in my hotel room just trying to be the little frog character. And it's pretty basic, like, this took 15 minutes, right? So don't judge me. But it's pretty basic, but it gets the point across that you can create a really simple character and put it out there and use-- Oh, I'm glad it's freeze framing on that one. That's really good. Okay.

But yeah, you have that as an option. So just know you could use AI to use characters. I would recommend the text to vector instead of text to image because that's going to give you a raster image, and that doesn't separate out the parts as well. So I think text to vector is probably the better way to go with that sort of thing. But yeah, it's the early days of this. So I think, hopefully, this side of stuff will get better in the future and be easier to do. Okay. So now you've got the basics of these are the ways that you could use Character Animators. So now what are you going to do with it? What kind of content are you actually going to make for social media to get out there and tell your stories, promote your brand, whatever you want to do? So these are kind of the most common things that I personally see, and I see people using Character Animator use. And that is either a single character monologue and explainer style video or a multi-character cartoon. So we'll kind of walk through these three things and talk about what they are, some examples of people using them and what you might do to create your own. So a single character monologue, this is the easiest. This is what I was showing earlier. It's just you got one character on a background, and, this is really easy to do. It's completely free in Adobe Express or Starter mode. This is great for social media because it's just one big colorful character talking to the camera. You feel like there's a one on one, conversation between you and them. And one tip you can try to do is just to make it a little more visually interesting is, like, every four to six seconds, zoom into the character or zoom back or do a close-up shot or back, and that's going to make it feel a little bit more visually interesting, just to switch between a wide shot or a close-up shot. So as an example, this is like a little example thing I did about this guy, Willie, who's from Pine Bros Lumberyard. And he's talking. He's got all these different emotions. And you'll notice I switched the camera every once in a while from like a wide shot to a close-up shot. I added this extra text on the side, things kind of slide in and out, as he's talking about the different types of wood and all that stuff. And it's a really effective strategy, particularly as he kind of goes through these different emotions. You'll notice he also has a happy and a sad mouth set. So he has-- Basically, he has 28 different mouths. He has a group of happy mouths and a group of sad mouths. And a lot of our example characters will have that, so you'll have the ability to trigger that. And even just something as simple as that, the mouth turning upside down, looking happy or sad is a huge way to get a lot of extra emotion for your character. And here's-- Okay. This isn't a single character monologue. I forgot Piney the Pine Tree comes in. And talks to him at some point too. I forgot about that. But yeah, anyway, it's just a fun little experiment.

Also it doesn't just have to be social media. This was-- My kid had a Harry Potter birthday party, and I rigged up the Sorting Hat. And I used a baby monitor and went upstairs using Character Animator streamed to the TV downstairs and had the Sorting Hat talk to the kids in my terrible British accent. Oh, welcome to Gryffindor and all this stuff. And I would talk to the people. I would just move my head back and forth, I just little trigger animation where it said the house that they were at. So I pressed G for Gryffindor, S for Slytherin, and it was a really fun thing. And, like, we heard from the parents later, like, "Hey, did you guys have, like, a talking Sorting Hat with a bad British accent? Like, the kids were talking about." I was like, "Oh, no. The accent was pretty good, but yes, we did have a Sorting Hat there." And it was just a fun, magical experience. And I think-- You can start to think once you start playing around with this, you can think of different applications. We have a developer on the team, Scott, who does something with Character Animator for Halloween every year. So he will project something like a talking a skeleton or pumpkin or something like that on the screen and say, "Hey, nice costume, Spider-Man," and there's kid's going like, "What! That's crazy." Like and having conversations with people as they go by. So you can do these kind of fun, live animated events and add this into your own life. And it's a lot of fun to play around with for sure. Okay. The second type of video that I see a lot is an explainer video. And this is where you add a narrator character that's kind of your anchor throughout the whole process to tell you about a story or a concept. So a lot of time you see the character, maybe they start centered, and then they kind of zoom to the side or talk through a particular concept. And I much prefer this to, like, a video where you just have kind of a disembodied voice behind the scenes and you don't know who it is or where they're coming from, when you've got a nice little friendly cartoon character, it kind of helps drive you through the whole thing and make things a little bit more interesting. You can do this directly in Express or composite over top of content from another program. So if you are comfortable with stuff like Premiere Pro or After Effects, you can bring your characters in there as well. And I'll talk about that in a little bit.

One thing, the way to do this in Express, and we just added this, like, maybe two months ago, is the ability. One of the background options is transparency. So if you click on Transparency and record yourself talking, you will get an option to have your character with a transparent background. You can't download the video with a transparent background right now, but you can open this character up in Express. And if you do that, your character is going to show up basically as a piece of video footage, but with a background that you can do whatever you want. So this is great. So now you've got this talking character that you've recorded. And now you can add search for a background of avocados and add these different colors and things like that. And everything else that Express can do, it's just adding this character to the equation, and you can add the animation, add little hearts, whatever sort of stuff you want. So we're seeing this more and more with Animate from audio. It's been a really big success. And, there's tutorials online. I'll talk about where you can find tutorials later, but you could-- Like I said, people are taking multiple characters where they'll do one character recorded a second character, drag them both in, layer them talking back and forth to each other, and do a whole back and forth, a multi-character concept. And it's pretty, pretty cool. And you can do this all free on a Chromebook if you really wanted to. So it's pretty impressive what's possible there.

There's a couple of other ways to get transparency. If you don't want to go the Express route or you're using the desktop app, one is, of course, you could use a green screen background and use that in any video editing program that allows keying to take that green out and then isolate your character. The one I use the most is the second one, Dynamic Link. This is a-- If you were in Premiere Pro or After Effects, and you import your Character Animator project, your CH proj file it's called, then it's going to automatically show your character without a background as long as you haven't selected a background, and you can layer that over top of whatever content you want. So you already know how to do video editing, then you just make a character, have them talk, drag that into your Premiere Pro scene. Now you've got a narrator character who you can resize, move just like any other piece of footage in Premiere Pro and add them around. I use After Effects a lot for this sort of thing, so I will do all my characters in Character Animator. I'll do one scene for each character. And then composite them together in After Effects at a background, foreground cameras, explosions, whatever you want, and it creates a really compelling cartoon. The last one is more of the fail-safe method which is, you can do a PNG sequence and WAV file. So, basically, it's going to make a PNG with full transparent background and for every frame of your animation. So let's say you're doing 12 frames per second animation, that means you're going to get 12 PNG files for every second of your animation. So if you're doing something a little longer, you can get thousands of files, but it's also going to have a WAV file that's the audio. And then that's a format that a lot of things will say, "Oh, is this a PNG sequence? Okay. Bring it in," and it should link up as long as you set the correct frame rate. So that's kind of a fail-safe option, but it's there if you need it. I've used this quite a lot in my own work. So this is the same we did for internally for Adobe. It was called Pivotal Moments where we talk about things that happened in our life that were interesting. So my first job out of college was doing the Teach for America program in Baltimore. And I wanted to talk about that story and my experiences there and how it kind of shaped me. And so I had my animated character here talking through the whole thing, going through different emotions, and then I used Adobe Fresco to draw some of the things that I was talking about, and Fresco has that great timelapse option where you can kind of export out your drawings and everything. And then I would add a slow-pan or zoom just to always keep things moving and keep it interesting as it was moving around. And it led to a really nice final product and made the video a little more interesting to have, like, cartoon Dave kind of talking through this whole experience. So it's a fun way to go about things.

So once you learn about characters and transparency, the world just kind of opens up to a lot of possibilities, and it's kind of like your imagination is the limit. So if you want to make an emo cartoon face and motion track it to your own face and sing acoustic Dua Lipa covers, you could do that. I don't know why anyone would do that, but you can do that, and do that sort of thing. And it's fun. Or you could take a cartoon character and composite them over top of real life footage, do same at After Effects to motion track them to things, add a shadow, make it look like they're part of that world, and again, do whatever you want with it. So there's a lot of fun possibilities that open up when you're thinking about this sort of stuff, particularly with transparency, putting your characters in different environments and worlds. Okay. So the last one that we've got here is a multi character cartoon. And this is when you're telling a story with multiple characters through the dialogue and interactions, talking back and forth, one character saying one thing, waiting, back and forth between the other and telling a story that way. This is a great way to get your friends and family, coworkers involved, to get them to supply voices, help you out with that stuff. And of course, you can use AI. People are using for some voice stuff as well. And like I was saying earlier, Puppet Maker is a really great way to make multiple characters that are showing up in the same style. So this is the way that I do multiple characters if I'm making something. I will use-- And this is-- By the way, this is the most advanced you know, workflow. So I would say don't start with this type of thing. Start with the one character things and then slowly work your way up to something like this. But what I'll do is I will have in something like Adobe Audition or any audio editor program, I will have tracks for each of my character voices. So here's my male character. Here's my female character, and they each have their own track. And so I will then cut up the audio so it's like my character's talking, then there's a pause. Character talking, then a pause. Then on the other track, I fill in those gaps with the other character. That gives me a clean audio track that I could use to bring into Character Animator and do the lip sync with because if I just had all the audio on the same track, then the character's going to be moving their mouth no matter what audio is coming in. It's not going to be able to detect if it's a different character or not. So I will isolate each track, export. Here's my male voice, here's my female voice. And then in Character Animator, there's an option called Timeline Compute Lip Sync from Audio, and that's going to analyze the audio track that you imported in and do all the lip sync automatically for you. So I'll do that for each character. So the male character talks, pauses, talks again, female character talks, and then composite them altogether in something like Premiere or After Effects. And because they both started 00, because they're both kind of going through this timeline, they will feel like they are talking and interacting with each other, in that way. And so it doesn't matter if you have two characters, five characters, whatever. This is kind of the method that I use for this sort of thing. Okay. Here's Avocado and Boba again. This is just a dumb thing that I made. It probably took me only an hour or something like that to put this together, but get ready, a lot of bad jokes coming up. - Hey there! - Oh, hey. Got some new jokes I am workshopping? Want to hear them? Oh, great. Here we go again. - Fine. - I threw a piano down a mineshaft. Guess what key it played when it hit the ground. - What? - A flat minor. Just stop. Did you hear the joke about the sheet of paper? - Never mind. It's "tearable." - And so is that joke. Did you hear about the new air freshener what works with mind control? It makes "scents" if you think about it. Yikes, I'm leaving. The guy who stole my dictionary just died. I have no words. Ahh! Okay. So reddit/r/dadjokes. Great resource for terrible jokes if you're looking for. But, like, okay, this was really dumb, for sure. But like I said, this only took me an hour, and you can see, like, the idea of these characters you create even if they're the premade characters, you add your voice to them. You add the scenarios to them. You decide what to do with them. You can imagine-- Like, I can imagine a TikTok channel called Avocado & Boba. And they just tell bad jokes, or they just interact with each other. And they have kind of these personalities, and they go back and forth with each other. This is not a real handle, by the way. I don't think so. Maybe it is. I don't know. I didn't check. But you can see this sort of thing and start to think about this, what kind of possibilities are there out there. We see this all the time where people are making complete channels and brands around a certain animated character. There's a pet store that has like a dog character that they do their TikTok videos with or people that make their logos, their corporate mascots, and the animated character and have these whole personalities and stuff that they do behind them. So it's not too hard to kind of think about these possibilities of making these characters kind of their own brands and telling these stories and doing some fun stuff like that.

A thing that I played around with making full cartoons, this series called Consoles. I've always loved video games. I'm a huge video game fan. And so I had this idea to make this video game series where the different main consoles are roommates and they're robots, and they talk to each other. So we've got Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Xbox, and Sony PlayStation. And so they're always making fun of each other, like, "Xbox, you don't have any games," "PlayStation, your controller gives people clinical tendinitis." And "Switch, you don't know what the Internet is, and it's 2023." And they talk back and forth between each other. I got my coworker and my brother to do the extra voices, and then I animated them all, composited them together in After Effects. And I've made three of these, and it's a really fun process. It's fun to, like, come up with these jokes about the industry and video games and put together something that's just these simple little web videos that are fun. So if there's things you're passionate about, characters you'd be interested in making, like, I think it kind of opens up the possibilities. Like, a lot of people come to Character Animator, I mean, or before and they're like, the idea of making a multi-character cartoon, like a five-minute cartoon just feels completely out of the question, like, I couldn't do that. And then you see, "Oh, I can just move my head around and talk. Well, wait a second. I got some ideas now. I could do this." And you can slowly build up your own character creation. He's talking of 3DO as part of this joke. That's an old reference. Oh, one clap for 3DO. Nice. Okay.

But this took a lot of planning, right? So this is what my audio track looked like in Audition. So you'll see all those different voices, showing up there the different characters. I wrote the script. I sent out the script to my friends, and my brother had them record the audio, spliced it up, did my sketches, figured out what these characters would look like in the scenes, storyboarded it all. So it was a bit of a full production. There was a lot a lot going on there, but it was fun. It came together, and it's been a fun little project to do.

You can also kind of do fan stuff if there's things you're interested in doing, so this is-- There's a video game podcast called Kinda Funny Games Daily that I listen to. And I took the podcast and made kind of a cartoon version of several of the hosts, I had them talking back and forth and doing dumb stuff. And just kind of as a silly little fan thing. So Podcast audio is a really fun thing. Have you ever heard a Podcast segment? And you're like, "This is so ridiculous. Like, I wish someone would animate this." Character Animator might be a good way to do that. And usually the creators, you show it to them, they love it, they think it's funny and cool. So that's a nice source of material if you're looking for a good place to start. Just use a funny segment that you heard on the podcast and do that sort of thing.

We do-- I don't do this as often as I'd like to because of time, but we do kind of point out, we do these community spotlight episodes where we kind of showcase some of the best work that we see in the community and people doing. And these are on my YouTube channel, which I'll talk about at the end that you can check out, but I'm always super inspired by this. Seeing all the different ways that people are using Character Animator just gives me ton of ideas of other things that I could do in the future. So I'm just going to kind of race through some of the cool examples of things that people have done. Pat Moriarty and Seth, they made this really cool hand-drawn looking thing for The Replacements for music video for a song called Shutup. They did a fantastic job there. This is a Instagram user called The Red Dot, and she talks about relationships and all sorts of stuff like that and does these characters that are talking to each other and getting in all sorts of trouble. Joe's Red Guitar. This guy is just really talented. He makes all these types of different characters, works at a for a local library, I think, for this one that he was working on. This guy Jay Alston is a TikToker, who just made a cartoon version of himself that often shows up in his various videos. All sorts of eyes states and stuff. This guy, he photographed these claymation style characters for The Weeknds and made this music video for him and added Character Animator over top of it. This guy Kooky Craftables, he does papercraft videos, and he made this little paper character, this kind of his friend that he talks back and forth to about his various things to keep things interesting. Another music video, these guys added Character Animator characters that are walking with a walk animation is one possibility you can do in Character Animator and then composite them in After Effects. There are people that sell Character Animator puppets. This is one of them. They're called Animation Guides, and they sell these pre-rigged puppets with all sorts of moves and states and things like that that you can do. Timm, very talented artist and makes all sorts of different cartoons and multi-character cartoons of people in an office environment, talking back and forth. This guy's crazy, Roscoe McGillicuddy. I still don't really understand what his cartoons are about, but they're interesting, very weird characters. He really plays around with, like, the distortion and stuff you can do. Outside of Me, another music video, has a character just kind of walking through a bunch of different environments. Even the fish were done with Character Animator, different band members in the background. I love this one, RiceBurger Studios. They're teaching Japanese on TikTok, and they use these animated characters to get the point across and talk about different concepts and terms and words and things like that. Peter did something in Adobe Arrow where he exported out the PNG sequence. I think you can import that into Arrow, and then he made this band that kind of shows up in real life. Lina Fleer, she did some awesome animation, has a YouTube channel where she kind of talks about different culture and events and things like that and has this really nice style that translates well. That Got Weird is same, did it on local PBS station, I think, in Minneapolis, where people talk about race and they didn't want to be on camera, so they made animated versions of them to talk instead. This guy Henk is crazy. He makes these weird experiments of fractals and things, and he composes them in Character Animator, moves them around with his head and voice. It's just weird. Skunk and Munk, kind of a children's cartoon type treatment, very nice colorful characters for YouTube and social media and all that stuff.

This guy Randy Schmidt did stop motion and put the mouth and stuff on Character Animator and tracked them on top of the characters, and then has this character talking to different people on web zoom. This guy talks about spiritual stuff, and he's got this kind of avatar character that he has-- Notice the dangle on the scarf there as it moves back and forth. Lauren's Lair, she's a web Twitch streamer, and she talks to different characters and has web version-- Animated versions of these different characters that she talks back and forth from. And finally, PB and the Buck, this is a nicely animated and lit thing. It has that line, a wiggle or boil look to it too, which makes it kind of feel unique. So that's just a quick run through, but you can see the diversity of styles and content and all the different stuff that people are doing and so it's really inspiring to see all that stuff and think about what sort of stuff could you do and put together. There's a lot of distinct possibilities there.

So I hope that whatever you've seen here today, it's given you some ideas about how you could add character animation into your creative toolbox, right? So I think not every project needs character animation, for sure, but we've got all these tools at our disposal. Maybe you know video editing or graphic design or audio or whatever. Now I hope you can feel a little bit more comfortable with world of character animation and feel like it's something that you can grab a hold of and integrate into your own project. So maybe it's a livestream on TikTok. Maybe it's a music video. Maybe it's an animated social media post that you want to do. All of those are possibilities, and I think it will just make some really interesting content.

So recommended next steps. If you're interested in learning more about Character Animator, these are a couple of websites you can go to to get some additional information. So we have our CH Examples site. This is where you get a ton of example characters. So you can get everything from the Starter mode puppets to Puppet Maker styles, the ones that are, like, the custom character creator styles, as well as the resources, like I was telling you, like, the mouth packs, background packs, audio sound effect packs. We have blank templates with all the names for Photoshop and Illustrator already made, and then you can drag your own artwork and customize it. That way, lots of options there. And then, the tutorials website where you're going to get really sick of seeing me with tracking lines on my face, talking through all these different things. But if you're interested in rigging your own character, there's a video that'll walk you through every step of the process. And these all have example files that you can download and follow with. But if you're interested in making your character walk or making your character turn their head when you turn your head or adding dance moves to them using motion library, there's a lot of possibilities here, and there's a lot of tutorial videos that you can use to get you through that. So we have a lot of content out there that should help you through it. I also have my own site that has a bunch of puppets as well. And this-- You'll notice a lot of the puppets I showed today are here too, so that Willie character, all those robots from the Console show, that guitar playing guy, that's my daughter's Little Lamby. I took a photo of her and rigged her as a puppet, Narrator Dave, Red Monster, all these different characters are completely free for you to use however you want, take them apart, do whatever you need to, learn from them, make your own stuff with them, whatever sorts of things you want to do with them.

If you want to get in touch with me, if you do have questions, you're starting to play with Character Animator and your puppet's head falls off, or you don't know what's going on, you're like, "I don't know where to find Animate from audio on Express" or whatever, feel free to reach out. I'm happy to answer questions, do whatever. And then this is all my information, my website, YouTube channel. I'm okay samurai on pretty much everything out there. So that's it. We'll do some questions. Thank you.

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