Cartoon Video Explainer

Hey Buddies! Last week I have worked on a cartoon style video explainer for the Italian website vivere.bio. In shorts, I have used Cartoon Animator, After Effects, Adobe Audition, Soundly, Photoshop.

I have tested a slightly new workflow for this gig, as I have massively used Cartoon Animator 4 Pipeline for the creation of the animation. Some weeks ago I already used it for a passion project, the animation of a famous Klimt painting, but this time I used a completely rigged character… but let me give you all the details!

After preparing the script, I have used the motion capture function of cartoon animator 4 to record the voice and the body/face movements of the character. You just need the plugin and a webcam to be able to do the movements capture. This function is similar to Adobe Character Animator. You can set the lip sync function to work directly on the recorded Voice over. You still need to go and edit the movements of the arms, as only the torso and head movements are automatically set. I also had to fix some of the lips movements.

As a side note, as I could not quickly find a female Voice, the VO has been registered with a male voice, then enhanced the pitch in Adobe Audition, to obtain a pretty acceptable female voice.

After that, I added a complete scene behind the character and also some props for visual enhancement. I felt anyway pretty limited in the choice and quality of secondary props and text animations. Hence I compiled the scene to a MP4 file and imported it into After Effects, where I know I can do almost everything can be imagined 😉

I have added all the texts, titles and most of the animations on the left of the main characters.

It is so easy to do a quick PNG in Photoshop and import it into After Effects to animate.

Regarding the shot with the plastic bottles falling from above, I have used the standard particles plugin in After Effects, with a bottle I have quickly drawn on my Wacom.

I must say that Cartoon Animator let the animation process to be really straightforward. I was impressed by the good quality you can have in such a short time. I am aware that the movements could have been improved even more, but that was not possible due to budget/time limitations. In conclusion, I am pretty happy with the workflow used for the production of this Cartoon Video Explainer.