The software continues recording as you select each preset, so if you’re quick enough you can match gestures and movements to events on the soundtrack. You insert actors, props and backgrounds (these can come from the built-in library or any image you choose) then import music, sound effects or recorded dialogue and select from a list of preinstalled animations for head and body – anything from walking to dance moves to hand gestures. Once you have a character, you can start animating. We’d recommend saving your project often. The program also crashed a couple of times, and as there’s no auto-recovery we lost our creations. There was one major frustration in that you can’t go back through the creation steps, so we often had to start actor creation from scratch when something didn’t look right at a later stage. Once we found the right pose for the photo – arms out to the sides, feet at 10 to two – we managed to import a passable computer-generated version of a human body. You also have a lot less fine control over defining the parts of the body, so your final actor can have spindly arms and jagged edges on his legs. Instead of selecting the part you want to cut out and keep, you have to use a masking tool to erase the parts of the picture you don’t want to use, which involves a lot of mouse work. For a start, it takes a long time to cut the body out from its background. Results when importing a body from a photo were more mixed.
So the software can animate the eyes and teeth, you replace those from your photo with computerised versions – this is the most fiddly part of face creation, as it’s hard not to create someone who looks like an animé character or Esther Rantzen. This involves adjusting numerous control points, to define the shape of the face, eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth, as well as eyes and teeth. You then outline the basic facial shape by defining the edges of the eyes and mouth, followed by advanced editing. The first stage is cropping out the head and doing some basic level adjustments. You can create an actor’s head and body from a single shot, but we had better results importing separate photos for each – the software defaults to cartoon-like large heads and small bodies, and you’ll be able to create more effective facial animations later with a more detailed head shot.
The software comes with a selection of 2D cartoon characters, but the main focus is on creating your own animated avatars – what the software calls ‘actors’- from photos. Crazy Talk Animator Pro aims to be an easy way to create 3D animations.
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