The cursor is mightier than the pen -- Kush and his sidekick "Hell-met" takes a dramatic look at possible ways to bring a play to life well before it is ever made.
Transcript:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
In this overly dramatic episode of Ask the Adobe ones, the real question is from Chuck, and he says:
I was pondering a question about Avatars and, since the fellow on Adobe
TV (that would be me) encouraged me to ask a question, here it is:
Then he goes on to ask something on the lines of:
Can you tell me a way to make the dialog from my script for a play to be read out loud by animated talking heads or avatars?
I do get a lot of crazy feature requests but I have to admit this has to be one of the more unorthodox things. But fear not, on Ask the Adobe ones, no question is too crazy to ask.
Chuck also pointed out a service that does something similar for adding computer voiced talking characters to web sites. Even though I think they do use flash as one of the tools used in it, there is no specific tool to do that from Adobe right now. How ever, if you can get your script read out loud from many of the free text to speech engines out there either using a free stand alone program or even one of the online speech services - I don't want to endorse one or the other so I'll let you choose which one of them to use - you can bring the file into Adobe After Effects and drop it on the time line and choose Animation - Keyframe Assistant - Convert Audio To Key frames and it converts the volume of the sound at each point of time into keyframe values so you can use expressions to link that to a puppet like mouth movement. I think there will be an episode of Short and suite that focuses a little more on that in the future.
I do have some experience with non-Adobe technologies used by 3D game developers that try to automatically map speech into 3D mouth shapes but I guess that sort of thing is an overkill in your case.
Yet, you still have to make your own characters which you can do with Adobe illustrator or Adobe Flash.
Now, I'm not an expert when it comes to theater. The closest I've been to going on stage was this play we made into a puppet show back in my high school in Italy called The Gold of lies. Despite the name of the play what I'm about the say is a true story. I'm talking about life sized puppets wearing real human cloths. I both voiced and controlled the puppet of my character which was some sort of royal official called lord something rather and during our premiere I moved my puppet a little too aggressively to the point his pants fell off from his wooden body right in the middle of a dialog while standing in the middle of the king's court! My drama teacher never instructed me what to do in a situation like that so all I could think of is to make the puppet cover where his privates would have been and hide behind a prop and continue to deliver his dramatic lines. Of course the audience was cracking up at that point and the people who were controlling the other puppets were also laughing uncontrollably so the whole play fell apart. So my experiences with theater wasn't very glamorous but I think I know enough to say that I don't think it is a good idea to use text to speech as it is now a days to read out your play. Unless of course your characters always speak in a very monotonous and emotionless way:
the universe consists of more than 3 dimensions. I think the universe is full of garbage. Get down. Hey that's my line! ....
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Ask The Adobe Ones - Episode 16by adobe1wannabe884 views
Is it hard to get a job at Adobe?
EthernetKid 2 years ago
not if you are good
adobe1wannabe 2 years ago