From the intitial contact to what they did last night, they ended up doing a lot more with the product than we initially anticipated. So our team has been working with them, helping them push it farther and farther. They liked the level of control they could dial in to this to deliver the experience that they wanted. Think of them as loops in traditional animation. They wanted to create a bunch of other triggers. They liked that it wasn't something that could just drive the mouth poses. But when they saw what Character Animator could do, they started poking around and talking to the team. It would be pretty bold of us to go out to as The Simpsons to be one of our first flagship customers. StudioDaily: What was the genesis of this? Did The Simpsons find Character Animator on their own and think they could make it work, or did you approach them about using it for something along those lines?īill Roberts: The nice thing was that it was them who came to us. (If you download After Effects CC, you get Character Animator along with it.) We asked Adobe's Bill Roberts, senior director of video product management, for some details. How'd they do it? The animators used Adobe Character Animator, software that's been available in a preview version as part of Adobe Creative Cloud since last year. Remarkably, he looked just like Homer Simpson, even though voice actor Dan Castellaneta was performing him live. For about three minutes at the end of this Sunday's episode, Homer appeared in the Fox Studios Secret Bunker to take calls from the viewing audience. Taking the live-TV trend to counter-intuitive lengths, The Simpsons made history last night by having an animated character - Homer Simpson, no less! - conduct a live Q&A at the end of a prime-time broadcast. Homer has things like specific blink cycles and movements that may have been inconsistent with their typical animation style if they used face tracking, so David Silverman (consulting producer/animator) triggered all of Homer’s movements from the X-keys (keyboard) triggers to keep their look and animation style consistent. They wanted the actor to be free to focus on taking calls and improvising answers without worrying about his movements. Update 05/26/16: Since this story was published, we've learned that face-tracking was not used to automate facial animation for the live broadcast of The Simpsons. Adobe responded to our follow-up question with this clarification on the methodology: There was no camera or motion tracking on. In a TV First, The Simpsons Had an Animated Character Taking Phone Calls from Viewers
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