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How do you make cartoon animations speak from text like this? What program do you use?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PuNKyrF4io

Winston wrote:How do you make cartoon animations speak from text like this? What program do you use?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PuNKyrF4io

I'm not an animator -- check with Terrence.

I think the "text to speech" and the animation from that are two different things. I haven't kept up on Text to Speech software because every Apple Mac can do that out of the box. It is a feature for blind users so that it can read your email to you, or any other document. You can choose many different voice styles. This technology has been around since the Commodore 64 in the mid 80's. Today it has gone even further with advanced tools like Vocaloid which can even sing.

There are a few good software tools for automatically animating a CG character mouth to a sound file. There was a really popular one we used to use back when I was working in the studios, but I can't remember the name of it. Today there are sinple cheap tools like Anime Studio or Crazy Talk that can do that and they do a great job. What they did in that video is simple compared to some of the stuff out there today. I wouldn't be surprised if they used a free tool like iClone or The Movies. These "machinima" or machinimation tools let pretty much anyone make their own Cg movie these days. Of course some skill in lighting composition and editing goes a long way, but doing two guys sitting in a room talking can be accomplished by practically any user of low cost tools like iClone or The Movies.

iClone Example Anyone can do stuff like this with these new tools.