[Music] [Dave Werner] Hey, everyone. My name is Dave Werner, and I'm a Designer with the Adobe Character Animator team. Now if you've never done anything with animation before, you might be scared off with the concept of adding animation into your own social media videos. Animation typically, traditionally, has been really time-intensive, it takes forever to make a character. It's really hard to make a character look natural and come to life. It's just a very long drawn out process. But luckily, with tools like Adobe Character Animator, the world of animation has never been more accessible. And that's really exciting because we think about when you scroll on social media, right? And you're going through and you're seeing influencers doing crazy stuff, cat and dog pictures, food, and then you see a talking avocado and immediately catches your attention, like, what's going on with this? It's unique. It stands out. It's friendly. It's approachable. That's the power of animation. So if animation isn't a part of your creative toolset, I highly recommend trying to add it in.
So today, let's start with walking you through a few different ways that you could get started in the world of Adobe Character Animator. And there are three main ways that people get into this. Number one is Express. This is the easiest way to get started. It's a quick action called Animate from Audio. It's completely free. It works on any browser, so you can use it on your phone, on a Chromebook. There's probably a refrigerator that can access it. Very, very easy to use. And all you have to do is record your voice, and then we automatically do all the animation for you. It could not be simpler. You can get an animation out the door in two minutes. If you want a little more control over your character though, then I would recommend the Starter Mode. This is a free downloadable app for Mac or PC, and you can also record your audio, your voice, but then you can also do face movements and add a few emotions, like, making your character happy, sad, angry, scared, all of that stuff. Now if you want all the bells and whistles, then you want Pro Mode. So if you're an Adobe pro and you're used to Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, all of that stuff, and you want that fine-tuned frame by frame control, and you want the ability to make your own puppets, and you want to be able to dynamic link with other Adobe products, then the Pro Mode is the way to go. So I'm going to do a quick demo of all three of these, and we're going to start with Animate from Audio.
All right, so I'm here in Adobe Express at the Animate from Audio quick action page. Just search for it online. It's very easy to find. And you can see that I've got a ton of character options here. So we've got these awesome new horoscope characters for every sign that's out there, which is really fun to be able to do. We've got a guitar playing character. We got a heart. We got all sorts of different styles and types of characters. So if there's something you're thinking of, there's probably a character for it here. There's just a ton of them. So I can select a character that I like and I can resize it, I can reposition it, anything like that. Now I also have the option to be able to choose different backgrounds. So if I want to put this goat in a library or in a forest or something like that, I have the ability to do that as well. I can also upload my own background if I had a specific background image in mind, or I could just do a color or transparency as well. And then we've got the option to do all of the different social media popular sizes here as well, so I can do that. So when I'm ready to record something, all I have to do is click Record. Now I can also click browse here and that's going to allow me to upload an audio file up to two minutes long. So if I have a coworker or friend who is just really dramatic, or great at voice acting, or something like that, I could have them record something, send it to me, and then I could upload it here. So all you have to do is click the Record button. It's going to go this little countdown, and then it's going to do recording. And you can tell it's working because that purple stroke is going to show up around the edges of the character, the box there. When I'm done, I click 'Done'. And then we process this all in the cloud and figure out how to do all of the animation. So I did this a little bit earlier. Here's a version that's already done. Let's click 'Play'. And you can see that the character is now moving their mouth based on the lip sync is matching the words that I'm saying, and it's doing all the correct mouth shapes, so Aa, Ee, Oo, all of that stuff are showing up at the correct time. And you'll also notice the character is doing little gestures, head movements, eye movements, all of that stuff. So you can see how quick and easy it is to get an animated character up and running, right? All I did was just talk for a few minutes, press a button, and I'm done. And I'm ready to download this and upload it to social media. So this is by far the easiest and quickest way to get started with character animation.
But if you want a little bit more control, then downloading the desktop app Character Animator is going to be the best way to go. And you can just do this with a free Adobe ID and download it completely for free. And that gets you access to what we call Starter Mode. Now you can tell what mode you're in, in the app by going up here to the upper right corner. And if I click on this, I can move between the different modes. So it says Stay in Starter or Use Pro. I'm going to show Pro a little bit later, so let's just stay in Starter. You have access to a ton of free characters. These are completely free to use however you want. So I could click on any of these. I can import a character if I found it from somewhere else online, or I can click 'See more'. And that's going to allow me to access a bunch of different characters online as well. In this case though, I'm just going to select a character. Let's choose this tall starter character, this blue cat, and he's going to get up and running. Now you can immediately tell that something is happening. As I am talking, as I'm moving my head, as I'm blinking my eyes, as I'm moving my eyebrows, my character is doing the same. So now the added element of of performance capture is showing up here. And I've got the ability to move my character into different locations. I can change the background if I wanted to, to a different background. I've got a lot of different options, size options, all of that stuff here. I could import an audio file, but I'm just going to go ahead and click 'Record face and voice'. It's going to do a little countdown and then I'm going to start talking. Now you'll notice that as I'm talking, I'm not moving all over the place crazily, right? So I think a lot of people when they start with performance capture, they just want to move all over the place and do this really one-to-one animation. But in traditional 2D animation, we do more what we call a pose-to-pose style of acting. So you have to do a little bit of acting here where you move from one pose to the next as you're talking, and that's going to give you a more traditional 2D look. It's not going to look as live, one-to-one style. So this is going to look a little bit better. Just a quick tip. When I'm done, I click 'Finish recording'. And now you'll see that that performance has been recorded and showing up here. And again, all the lip sync is matching up, all the head movements, all of that stuff. But if I were to just play this back, the character looks okay, but there's no real emotion behind it. The character is always in this happy go lucky state, right? And I might want to do a little bit more with it. So that's where these things called triggers come in. So I have the ability to-- Let's stop right here and try a different trigger. So here's a wave. Here's a shocked. Here's laughing. Here is sad. Here's crying, angry, and you so on and so forth. So you see my character has all of these different things, including just these basic gestures that I can move between. And all you have to do to add one of these to my timeline is just click and drag it, and it's going to add it down here. Now the ability to extend it if I wanted to go a little bit longer, but let's move a few of these in. So maybe I'm waving at the beginning, and then I do a quick gesture to the side, and another gesture here, another gesture here. And you could see how quickly I can add some emotion and movements to my character. And now when I play this back, you'll notice it's a lot more receptive. It's moving a lot better, and the character feels like it's got a little bit more emotion. It's not just staring at me blankly, right? There's a little bit more going on. So I can fine-tune this. I could add as many of these as I want. And then when I'm done with it, I can just go up here to share and very quickly export and download my video file and I'm good to go.
Again, this is a great way, so we started with Express, easiest way. Starter Mode, second easiest way with a little bit more control. But you might want even more options. And that's where Pro Mode comes in. And the good news is you can upgrade a Starter Mode project to a Pro version at any time. All I have to do is go up here, click it, and go to Use Pro. And now you'll notice that I'm currently in Pro Mode. And notice there's a lot more going on here at any given time. So I've got the ability to do all sorts of things. Number one, I can turn certain animations on and off at a time. So if I turned everything off right now, nothing is being recorded. But if I click just Face, now only the face movements are recording. And then I can turn that off and maybe I then move to Lip Sync and I do the lip sync. So you can record and isolate and do things one at a time, giving you a lot more custom control. The way I like to think of it is like recording audio, right, like in a band, right? So you start with the drums, and then you add the bass, and then the guitar, and vocals, and the glockenspiel, whatever you're adding into it and you create a full animated performance, but you layer it piece by piece. You'll also notice that the timeline is a lot more complex as well. So if I press the plus button a few times, I can really dig in here and see what's happening. So I see that every mouth shape that my character says is showing up down here. And so if I decide this L mouth is not the right one, it didn't work correctly, or I want to emphasize a different mouth shape, all I have to do is right-click this and I can choose whatever different mouth I want and that's the one that's going to show up. Then I've got my triggers down here. So I see it's a gesture that I did. But if I right-click this, again, I can change it to whatever emotion I want and then reposition it and do whatever. So you just have a lot more control in this scenario over the types of things you're doing. Not to mention that this character is actually just a Photoshop file behind the scenes, right? So this character has all of these different layers and parts that I put together to create an animated character. There are a ton of videos that go more into the rigging process. I'm not going to do that too much today. But for example, if I select the head up here, and this is just a group with all of the head contents inside of it, you'll notice over here that has been tagged as a head. And all that means is, as I move my head, anything that's been tagged as a head is also going to move with my own head movements. Same thing with the eyes, same thing with the eyebrows, all of this stuff. So it's really easy to create a character and then tag certain things. If you name them correctly in the original Photoshop file, then it's going to auto-tag it when you first import it into Character Animator. And we've got a ton of blank templates and things like that that you could use to get started. But then, all you have to do is tag all of this stuff and then I've got a character that's immediately reacting to my mouth, to the words that I'm saying, to my eye movements, to my head movements, all of that stuff and it can create a really compelling character quickly.
But you might be saying, "Okay, that's great, but I don't have the time to put together a character." And all of these characters, they've looked, I've seen them in other social media videos online. I've seen this Red Monster guy everywhere. I want to create a custom character, but I don't want to spend all the time making it in Photoshop or Illustrator. Well, you're in luck because one of the best Pro Mode features is this thing called Puppet Maker over here. It's your very first option. Let me go ahead and click on that. And that puts me into this special mode that allows me to create my own character based off of a bunch of different parts. So I see if I scroll down here, I've got different hairstyles that I can choose from. I like that one. Different hair colors. Let's go with that color. Different props that I could add in there. I like the hat. Skin colors, all sorts of different tones that I could use here.
Different eyebrow shapes. And so I'm doing basically a real-time avatar creation system here where I can choose all of the different parts that I want for my character. And behind the scenes, this is just a Photoshop file that I'm picking and choosing the different layers from. And so really quickly, I can create an animated character that is customized to look like myself, look like a coworker, look like a friend, or whatever cast of characters I want. I love this Randomize button right here. This is one of my favorite features. If I click on this, it's going to create a random assortment of the different parts. And so I could really quickly create a cast where here's my main character, here's the crazy neighbor next door, and here's the best friend, and all this stuff. If I want to refine anything I don't want the devil horns there, I can change that and keep refining it. And when I'm done, all I have to do is click 'Generate'. And that's going to generate the character and it's going to strip out all the parts that I don't need. And it's going to keep all the ones that I need and bring it into Character Animator Pro Mode so I can go ahead and record it. But the best part is that you're not limited to one style. So for example, if I wanted a different style, maybe I'm trying to do something that feels a little bit more like an anime character. Then I've got a completely different style that I could choose from here. And you'll notice this has all new options that I can choose from. And then click 'Randomize' and get a bunch of different characters here, too. So there's no 'one style'. With a lot of character creation systems, you're stuck with the style and you either like it or you don't. But here, there are a ton of options you can use or you can click the 'See more' button up here to take your website to download even more. So this opens up a ton of just really exciting creative possibilities. And it's really easy to create a cast of characters that are all in the same style. Because a lot of times, if you want at least two characters talking with each other, you probably want them to look the same and look like they were generally part of the same cartoon universe, right? So that's the type of thing you want to do. I'll just show this fantasy character really quick. I love this character who's-- If you were doing a D&D, role-playing campaign or something like that, something like this would be fantastic to use. All right, so that's an overview of the three different ways to use Character Animator. And now as you're thinking about this, you might think, "Okay, I might want to make my own characters and my own videos." And the hot topic right now, you've probably already heard this 500 times as part of Adobe MAX is AI. How could you use AI tools like Adobe Firefly to help bring your creations to life? Well, it is a great way to add background and foreground elements to your cartoons. So one of the easiest things to do is where you want your character to be and then just type it into Firefly and now you've got the frog in a jungle background. And then maybe I do some leaves or something like that in the front to really help sell the effect and feel like it's part of the scene. Now you can generate characters, too, but it's not like you can just click a button and they're automatically going to be ready to go. Because remember Character Animator puppets have all sorts of stuff that are associated with them, the different mouth movements, the eye movements, all of that. And you can't get all of that from just a flat image yet. So the best way to do these things is to generate something and then break it down into multiple parts. And so, for example, here's a name I did, a frog character I did with the generate vectors thing in Adobe Illustrator. And so I was able to type 'cute frog character'. And the nice thing about Illustrator is it's going to break it down into all of these different parts. So the nice thing is I can just rename them and organize them in a way where I put all the head contents in a head group. Here's the mouth. Here's the blink state. Here's the eyeball. All of that stuff. And if I know what I'm doing, I can turn that into an animated character. Now this character was made in five minutes. Very simple, very crude, but it just goes to show that it's really easy to get up and running with just a few reorganization and renaming type things. So it is totally possible. And if you're interested in this thing, there's a ton of videos online on how to go through this process. So both of these videos are available on my YouTube channel. Just search for Okay Samurai, and you can find animated characters with AI art, how to basically create a character, rig a character from a still image. And then the second one, making animated AI character shorts, is how to take those characters and then bring them together into a live video or an animation or something like that.
Okay, so now you've got your character and you're ready to go and you want to start making videos-- What are you going to do? What's your first video going to be? Well, here are the three most common things that I personally see online when people are using Character Animator. And that is a single character monologue, an explainer video, and a multi character cartoon. So let's go through all three of these. Number one would be a Single Character Monologue. This is quick and easy to get started within Adobe Express or Starter Mode because they both focus on a single character and they're both free, and so it's really easy to get started with that sort of thing. This type of thing is great for social media, right? Because you just have a big, beautiful, bold, colorful character staring directly at you and talking to you, and that works really well for getting people's attention online. One thing you might want to do is mix up wide and closeup shots to give yourself a little bit of variety. So for example, this is a video I did a while back about this lumberjack character. It's like a two-minute skit just talking about whatever, it's really dumb, but it was fun to do. And I notice every few seconds I change between a wide shot and a closeup shot. Now you can just do simple zoom-ins in your editing app of choice. Character Animator does have a camera system that you could use for this thing. And then I add little details like things sliding in and out to hopefully make it feel a little bit more compelling and interesting. So you have that as an option as well. So basically, whatever you can do to help bring your character to life and have more visual diversity as your character is talking, those are all going to be great things that are going to help your video be a little bit more compelling.
So that's a single character. And then we move into what we call an Explainer video. So this is where you've got something you want to talk about. Maybe it's a product concept. Maybe it's your earnings report for the last quarter. It could be whatever thing. Think of it as your PowerPoint presentation, or your video, or whatever you're doing, but you want someone to narrate you through the process or narrate the viewer through the process. And that's where a animated character comes in, where you can have this friendly anchored presence to potentially disparate parts that you're talking about. So instead of like a-- You see this all of the time where you have a video and you have this disembodied voice in the background. And you don't know who it is, and particularly on social media, that's not going to play because everyone has their sound off anyway. So it's not really drawing them in, whereas a character like this is really going to be an anchored presence and help guide the viewer through the whole process. Now there's a bunch of different ways that you can do this. So one way is in Adobe Express, you'll notice that one of your background options is a transparency option. So if I go into Background and I click on Transparency, that's going to give me my transparency grid. Then I go ahead and record like normal. Now I can't download this as a video with the transparency. Instead, the next step I would want to do is go into Adobe Express. So you click the 'Open in Adobe Express' button and that's going to bring that character with a transparent background into a new Adobe Express project. And so what this allows you to do is add all sorts of stuff like your text, or your avocados in the background, or whatever thing you want. And it just makes the ability to add all of this extra scene stuff around it. And then you can export this out to whatever your social media platform of choice, whatever.
There's a bunch of different ways you could get transparency. So you could use a green screen, so just make a green background. And then again, using your editor of choice, key that out. I would use Premiere or After Effects, but you can obviously use whatever you want. There are phone apps that can do this now. Dynamic Link. If you're familiar with Dynamic Link in Premiere and After Effects, it works the same way with Character Animator. If you import a chproj file, a chproj file into Premiere or After Effects, it's going to show up with the character with a transparent background. And then you can layer it over top of whatever you want, video content, an animated background, anything you want. And so this makes it really easy if you're already familiar with those tools to add an animated character in. And then finally, we've got the PNG sequence and WAV. And this is basically going to create a image with transparency for every frame of your video. So if you're 24 frames per second, that means you're going to get 24 PNG images for every one of those seconds. So it's a lot of files, but PNG and WAV is a pretty universally accepted format that's allowed in a lot of different apps. And it might be the safest bet for getting stuff out there. So three different ways to get these options. But once you do that, you can put your character and layer them over top of whatever you want. So this is an internal thing that I did, for Adobe Design. It was called Pivotal Moments. I was talking about my job, teaching, before I joined Adobe. And you'll see there's all these stats and drawings and things like that. They're showing up in the background. And meanwhile, this animated character, a cartoon version of me, is talking through it in the corner. Now I mixed this with Adobe Fresco. I did time lapse drawings there and then exported those videos out and then composited everything together in Adobe After Effects. So you can really have a lot of fun with these multiple products coming together and creating interesting stories.
And if you learn how to do this stuff, a whole world of creative options opens up where you can layer your characters over top of real life videos. So if you want to swap in a cartoon face for yourself and motion track it while you're playing guitar, you can do that. If you want an animated character, do you know step on your keyboard and you add a little shadow underneath him to make him feel like he's walking across your desk? You have these interesting creative options you can bring into play. So if you explore this, I think it completely opens up a ton of really exciting possibilities.
Okay, so the third option would be a Multi Character Cartoon. And this is where you have multiple characters, at least two, back and forth talking and having some script and telling some story. You could get your friends to help out with the voices, or use AI generation tools. And Puppet Maker, as I said before, is a great way to have multiple characters. So this is how I do my multi character workflow. I've got my audio I'll do in Adobe Audition. So what I'll do is record audio for each character on each track. And that allows me to isolate. All right, here's my male character voice, here's my female character voice, here's whoever. And then I can solo those out and export them individually. So when I'm doing the lip sync in Character Animator, it's only going to do the lip sync and movements for that particular character's voice. So the mouth isn't going to be moving when the other character is talking because that part's going to be silent. And then I can composite those together in something like Premiere Pro or After Effects later on. So just to take a closer look, this is like how my Audition timeline will look. I basically have my audio for one character and another and all the gaps. I'll do my background music and sound effects and all of that stuff. And then I'll isolate it and download or export each individual part, bring it into Character Animator, and then bring it all back together in something like Premiere or After Effects. So you can think how you could really easily create a multi character cartoon for social media. So imagine this Boba and Avocado are talking and maybe they're just telling really bad jokes. And that's your whole premise. You could create a whole channel out of just that or social media account over just that. You never have to show your face. You never have to do anything. All you have to do is tell terrible jokes and put it out there into the world. And it's a really easy way to get content out there. And this could be an award-winning channel. This is not taken or if it is, I don't know who owns it. But you could do something like this. So start thinking about these sorts of things where you could have an animated character who does movie reviews, or video game playthroughs, or whatever stuff you want to do. There are a ton of possibilities here of what's possible when you open up your imagination.
This is a quick preview I just wanted to show a project I'm currently working on, it's a interactive story on YouTube called Puddle. And I've rigged my character a certain way where I said where the elbows were and the wrist and the knees and all of that stuff. And that allows me to use something called motion library, which allows my character to run and jump, or do different walk animations, or that thing. And what I could do then is take this character and bring it into After Effects and bring all of these other elements. So I've got like a foreground and background and title treatments and all of that. So here's a preview. Now we're in After Effects. I'm showing it all coming together. I've got some Light Leaks that I'm showing over top here. I did the live kinetic type in Adobe Fresco. I drew all of these things in Fresco, brought them in, in Photoshop. There's some nice parallax happening there. And then here comes in our main character, Cecilia, and she's walking in. The camera zooms in. She waits by the puddle. There's a reflection on the puddle, and there you go. And you can see that this character, Cecilia, she's just another piece of footage, an animated piece of footage. And I can rescale her, move her around however I want. So you can see how all of these different elements come together to create a really interesting story, right? In reality, this is a bunch of PNGs and a Photoshop file and Fresco videos and a Light Leak video that I'm doing a blend mode to. And it's like you can see down here a bunch of different layers that are all stacking together. But when you put it all together, it's going to create really interesting results. So I hope that this gets you excited about the possibilities of animation and how you could use it in your own projects. There are a ton of ways to add animation. And every day, there's not a week that goes by where someone doesn't send me something cool that they've made in Character Animator that I've never seen before. So I'm so excited for you all to get started. And if you do want to learn more, the best steps are to go to some of these websites. So the chexamples site, that's a great resource for downloading free puppets and resources. You get free puppets, free templates, free mouths, lip sync that you can just plug into your own puppet, background, sound effects, anything you want like that. Now if you want to learn more and go more in-depth into any of these topics, so maybe rigging the character yourself, or how do you do a walk animation, or how do you use magnets to have a character pick something up off the ground, there are dedicated tutorials at this second link. And you're going to get real tired of seeing my face with motion tracking lines on it because that's how most of these tutorials are going. I also have my own puppet site, okaysamurai.com/puppets and you can go there to get some free puppets as well. Okay. And if you have any questions or anything you're interested in, or you run into a problem, please feel free to reach out. I'm really easy to get in touch with. okaysamurai.com is my website. YouTube, Okay Samurai. Okay Samurai everywhere basically is how you get in touch with me. All right, thanks so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Adobe MAX. Later!
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