Leave it to Japanese TV to come up with a wild scheme for world news.
Just take one boring political speech, plug it through a team of animators versed in Voice-O-Matic, and add a little bit of humorous background animation and there you are… Your lip synced cartoon caricature of world figures is complete and on air within 5 hours. Maybe if C-Span did this people would know more about politics.

Genseisha was behind the tv series which created 200 CG caricatures of world leaders using Autodesk Softimage and Di-O-Matic plug-ins.

“The project is based on creating an animation from the daily news.” explained Masuda Eiko, from Genseisha. “Since the animation is on air on the evening news program, the whole production is completed within about 5 hours, from modeling to compositing and including animation.”

Masuda reveals: “Each character’s face is rigged with bones and custom parameters in order to be ready for the animators to use. The body animation and the facial expression (other than the lip sync) are all manually keyframed by the animators, We are using Voice-O-Matic to speed up the lip sync process. We started with US President Obama’s inauguration speech animation.”

Voice-O-Matic automates lip sync animations with any 3D character rig in any language and help reduce production time drastically. Voice-O-Matic from Di-O-Matic is available as plug-in for Autodesk 3ds max, Autodesk Maya as well as Autodesk Softimage.

“Since there is never a time when a character speaks without emotion, additional ‘acting’ was needed in addition to the lip sync. Which included tweaking the overall shapes and animation curves as well as animating eyes and eyebrows. Our criteria for choosing Voice-O-Matic were quality, flexibility and cost efficiency. It was also very important for us to easily implement Voice-O-Matic within our existing production pipeline.” reveals Masuda.

Watch Genseisha’s youtube page for more videos

or Go to their website! (if you understand japanese)

For more on Di-O-Matic check out their website.