My New Favorite Thing... Adobe Character Animator!

I was scanning Twitter one afternoon this week when I saw a post about an Adobe Education training to use Character Animator in the classroom.  I did a little digging around and OMG!!! I've found the next thing to add to our makerspace.

Character Animator takes a puppet you create in Photoshop or Illustrator and brings it to life.  The software is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud.  The movement is creating using face tracking via your webcam.   The lip sync feature uses sound to give the illusion of talking.  Through videos and templates created by Dave Werner (@okaysamuri) I was up and running in no time.  This is the getting started video I used.  You can access his templates and other resources by going directly to the YouTube page for this video and expand the description.

Knowing Illustrator or Photoshop make the process easier, but you can still be up and running using pre-made puppets.  Within 15 minutes, I'd created a simple character and my first video.  It's not pretty, but you can see it here.

The thing I couldn't stop thinking about was how students could use this for projects.  I imagined a student generated Abraham Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address or Bud from "Bud, Not Buddy" telling of his adventures from the book as he went searching to find his father.  I imagined an animated school mascot providing announcements on our YouTube channel.  The possibilities are endless.

Heads of Curriculum is another little gem I stumbled across while searching for puppet templates.  They have 8 school related templates:  a skeleton, historical figures and literary characters.

I've already shared this with a couple of our social studies teachers.  I'll be sure to post student generated videos as soon as I have some to share.