Air Guitar

Happy Birthday World Wide Web - 16 today - and like all teenagers - confident of going onwards and upwards but not quite sure where. I was over 60 when the Web was born, but cannot now imagine what life would be like without it.

Just today I came across yet another marvel; A T-Shirt that you can don and play Air Guitar.
There have been other 'computerised' Air Guitars, which work on the basis of Motion Graphics as used for 3D animation, but this one uses Intelligent Textiles; similar in principle but more sophisticated. In this Blog of 20th October, I reported on a T-shirt with a built in screen, so we are getting close to becoming walking computers.

My interest in the Air Guitar is that I am a strummer myself and use guitar programs that teach by having animated scales and chords. I have seen robots that play piano quite well, and knew of someone who used a midi-keyboard to operate theatre lighting.

One of my pet themes is to be able to create movies in the way one can write scripts. It requires some form of visual input device rather like the above T-Shirt instead of the network of attached wires used in Motion Graphics. Perhaps future T-shirt will have on them 'Been there, done that, now watch the Movie'.

Stan

Silent Voices

Have you ever had to get your movies translated into another language? Subtitles are not great because you miss the action while reading them. Dubbing is not all that good as it is usually obvious that the lips are not in sync with the sound. In live-action the background actors can sometimes get by saying 'Rhubarb, rhubarb' and making suitable gestures, but it's a problem yet to be solved.

As I am severely deaf, I have learnt to lip read to a limited extent. I never took lessons, but often watch TV with the sound off. It works OK with news readers but not so well with actors; so I am always interested in new ideas related to hearing.

One idea I read about yesterday at http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19225755.800-its-the-next-best-thing-to-a-babel-fish.html describes a method whereby the speaker simply mouths the sounds in one language and it gets instantly translated into another language.

The method is not yet perfect, but the potential for the Movies is fantastic. As it depends on facial movements instead of sound, then an actor could be connected to many machines and do translations into dozens of languages at once. A step further would be to record the facial movements for a given actor and apply these to an avatar. For the technically minded you can look at http://www.mcrlab.uottawa.ca/papers/ACM-postr3.pdf dealing with Virtual Reality.

What will they think of next? Well, if you want to find out then take a look at Lip shapes .
If you just want to amuse yourself then try http://www.dookyweb.com/avatars.swf

Stan

Sound Effects

I once worked with a group of teenage truants. The teacher in charge told me that it was unlikely that many would turn up to my class, but in fact they nearly all turned up - much to the surprise and delight of the teacher.

Instead of trying to teach animation I started with the idea of making a soundtrack for a haunted house. I asked them if they could scream, groan, and work out some grisley sounds; they could and did, and loved it.

We never actually got around to making a movie for the track to go on, but did quite a bit of other noisy recordings, and in the process released a lot of pentup tension in the group.

With young children it's a good idea to start with animal sounds. You can find many sites with these, but a good one is http://www.davisfarmland.com/fun/funsound.htm

Of course, all children can make animal sounds, but it is interesting to know what sound they make.
Trying typing in Animal sounds + Africa and then change the country.
You will find how different the animal accents are around the world at:
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/animals/

Another site at http://www.findsounds.com/types.html has a huge library covering just about anything you can think of. Acting out movements with the sound effects is good fun.
Another interesting site is http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/tagsViewSingle.php?id=181_3618

It is a good excercise to try and create your own sound effects with your voice, and things you can find in the class room. Shake, rattle, and roll things around; tap, drop, and scrape things. Then suggest how one can make sounds like the wind and rain.

UNESCO offers a free digital training kit at: http://unesco.uiah.fi/ydc-book/ which contains both audio files and an editor. Also http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/


Here are some other sites to get started on:

Animal sounds
Machine sounds
Weather sounds
Instrument sounds


Stan

stan@makemovies.co.uk

Lip Sync

About thirty years ago when I was involved with computer animation at the Imperial College, one of the projects we looked at was creating automated lipsync.
In principle it was fairly easy; a set of lip shapes were matched to a set of phonemes in a look-up table, and you typed in the syllables and gave them a number of frames.

In those days there was no instant playback so if you got the timing wrong it took some time to check. But it wasn't practical for other reasons such as needing different shapes for different faces, also size, gender, age, and accent affect the shape of the lips.

I am not an animator but a scriptwriter, and my interest was the idea that one day I would be able to type in a script and both see and hear it played back. I thought it might always be a pipe dream, but I have recently seen some examples that come close to doing just that. One of the programs is http://www.reallusion.com/go/crazytalk/default.htm which allows you to record your voice and have it spoken by an animated character.

I recently looked up "lipsync for animation" and got a hit rate of over 300,000, so developments have moved on.
I haven't tested them but here's a couple examples here that you may like to look at to see the current state of the art.

www.thirdwishsoftware.com/magpie.html
www.lostmarble.com/papagayo/index.shtml

Also some other sites: Lip Sync


Stan