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. 

Animation

Today I created a short animation with one other member of my class. We had previously decided on our cross curricular topic of healthy living. We knew we would be creating a movie on healthy eating later in the elective so, decided to use exercise as our focus for the animation. We wanted to keep it simple as we had less than three hours to create the story, character, to film, edit, add sound and text and upload to YouTube. We decided to use the character of a bear and make an exercise video. Before the class I was a little apprehensive as I had attempted an animation in B.Ed1 which had been unsuccessful. I think this was down to time restrictions and then in our one last push to finish we ended up losing some of our scenes. This time, however, everything worked out well. I was conscious of the time so stayed focused and kept it simple. We used Digital Blue to create our movie. The equipment is easy to use and I would feel confident using it with a class. We quickly remembered the basics to filming and worked through the different stages of our exercise video. We wanted to use a specific song for the animation which we found on YouTube. We then used Fetch to convert the track into MP3 file format. We tried to add our track to Digital Blue but were unable to do so and had to move over to Windows Movie Maker. Although this was slightly irritating at the time I am pleased now as I can use both programmes. We added our track finding the section we wanted to use and fading the music in/out to sound more professional. Finally we added text and uploaded our animation onto YouTube. It was a proud moment.

The task was supposed to be collaborative where we would write the script then pass it onto the next group, who would create the characters and so on until the story came back to the original group to film. I think this is a good idea and would definitely use it with a class, but am glad we did not have to do that today. I do not think we had enough time to do this all in one session and would not have had the opportunity to get to know the programmes. If I were to use this with a class I would split it up into different lessons, so the story boarding would be one, designing the characters would be the next...

All in all I really enjoyed today and am looking forward to using my new found skills in my teaching practice.

See animation below.