Crazy Talk, making any image talk!

This week I was introduce to Crazy Talk, an innovative piece of software which transforms any digital image into a talking, animated character bringing them to life with real time puppeteering. you can make it as simple or intricate as you like. You start by uploading a photograph, image or you can use one of the many images already in place. Then by clicking and dragging Certain dots into place the software enhances facial fitting. You can use only four points, which is the basic fitting or you can move up to a more advanced level if desired. Emotion can be added to your actor with emotive one-click mood animations, ideal for beginners or young children, or you can have full control of custom facial for the more advanced. everything becomes animated: eyes, eye brows, lips, nose, cheeks, full head movements... The out comes looked fantastic and I could not wait to have a go. We watched online tutorials to get us started. The first part was fine we chose a bear picture so we could make him into Bertie Bear and add to our Wiki. We uploaded it and and matched up all the points, we used the more advance setting but only because we though we had to. we added teeth and things then recorded a story for our bear to tell. So far so good we thought. It was time to add our facial expressions and head movements. The software automatically added simple mouth movement which we were happy with. We tried to add in the head movements, blinking ect but really struggled. We were starting to get pretty fed up and were thinking this would be no use in the classroom as it was way to difficult and time consuming. Then we realised you can add one click mood animations, perfect. There were lots to choose from and we took the time to to see what many of them looked like. Here is what we came up with.

I love this program as I feel there is so much you can do with it from discussing emotions with young children or autistic children to using a historical character to introduce a topic to bringing children's work to life with an animated character.