CrazyTalk Animator – Create 2D animations in no time

Have you always wondered how creative video designers accomplish to turn simple paintings into pictures in motion? You can do exactly that at home and all by yourself! The CrazyTalk Animator allows you to do what so far only the film studios could do. Either photographs or paintings can be used as a template.

Those templates will be animated automatically and additional expressions can be created by yourself. In addition, you will find a great deal of templates in the database of the CrazyTalk Animator. With those default templates alone you already can produce a tremendous video set.

We took our time to test the CrazyTalk Animator for you.

Tutorials for the beginner

Since it was the first time that we tested such a type of software, we made good use of the numerous tutorials for our test of the CrazyTalk Animator. Those tutorials all have been provided by Reallusion – the producer of the program. First we made ourselves familiar with the user interface. The main functions – like „animation“, „background“ and „actors“ – are all arranged in typical fashion on top of the screen.

At the first glance the program seems to be very easy to use. But we soon discovered that many possibilities were hidden in the details. Still making one step after the other remained a fairly easy task. As soon as we failed to figure out what to do, there was an appropriate tutorial at hand to help us out. Definitely a plus and very nice for beginners!

Let’s go

In our test of the CrazyTalk Animator, we used the default pictures, figures and effects, provided with the program. This made it easier for us to comfortably test the range of functions and the ease of use. Of course, the program is designed to create absolutely individual and unique animations.

Therefore, we chose the picture of a school as a background and implemented the default figures „Cherry“ and „Eddie“. All this was done with a few buttons on the top of the screen. It was also there, where we found the function to „flip“ the figures, in order to make them look at each other.

Time for some animation

The placement of the figures and the background was just a matter of seconds. The same went for the animations. In our test of the CrazyTalk Animator, we made Eddie and Cherry dance in diverse fashions. We also made them jump and let them act in various ways. So we were toying around a little bit to see what can be done with the program.

Unfortunately not all of the animations were already implemented, so that we had to download like every second animation separately from the producers homepage. This took away a little bit from the positive impression so far. We thought that an implemented database should be complete and only optional extras should require separate downloads. Still, animating figures and pictures with such amazing ease was fun to do.

It is not only that one can assign movements to the various figures. When configuring the details there also the time axis has to be kept in mind. Every figure starts from a point at 0 seconds and can move on to further points from there on. This way it is possible to configure figures in a way that they appear sooner or later in the picture than other figures. This allowed us to create a comic or cartoon like atmosphere while doing our tests.

The special effects

After we had assigned some movements to our figures, we went on to implement some fancy special effects. Those special effects are separated into the groups „objects“, „text“ and „sound“. Besides speech bubbles and signs there are sounds like a ringing telephone pre-installed. But unfortunately the default database was just equipped very poor in this part. The most special effects are supposed to be implemented by the user himself. So we could just do little testing on this topic.

Overall

In our test of the CrazyTalk Animator, we just discovered the basics to experience if it is really that easy to create a high quality animation. The rather easy user interface doesn’t seem overblown at all. As a matter of fact – the most functions were just like a right click away. This allowed us to navigate with ease and to explore the seemingly endless possibilities, when it comes down to creating animations. New templates can be quickly imported via Photoshop or equal programs. It is possible to completely animate and scale bodies as well as faces and objects. The bottom line is that we are completely satisfied with the CrazyTalk Animator.