Animate Any Face of Any Photo Using Crazy Talk 7

I am going to show you how you can quickly animate any face of any photo using the animation software called Crazy Talk - a product by Reallusion. For those who have read any of my tutorials here, you know that I usually blog about the GNU Image Manipulation Program referred to as GIMP. But today I will be getting into another software program. This other software program will help you to make your time and effort spent on GIMP well worth it. And, trust me when I say this, it is not an expensive product at all.
The fact if, Crazy Talk 7 is a very user friendly piece of software. When I have an animation project I need done quickly and easily, I, more often than not, use Crazy Talk.

 

Tis the Time of the Year for Ghosts and Goblins

 

Besides Christmas, Halloween is my favorite time of the year. Don't you think? And this is the best time of the year to show off your expertise in graphics and animations. What better way to achieve that than with Crazy Talk 7? For any of your Halloween graphics and animation projects, I think Reallusion does a good job of producing the software to make it happen. I just created one for Youtube that I uploaded today.

 

Let's Get to Work Shall We?

 

First thing, I am using Crazy Talk 7 which is version 7.31. This is just so I'm not being misleading with my tutorial.
So, go ahead and open up the program - if you have already downloaded it (otherwise, it can be downloaded from here). When you first open Crazy Talk, you'll find that there are already a set of actors that come standard with the program.
You have the option to use those or, if not:

1. Proceed to Crazy Talk's main menu and click Create New Actor. This will be the very first item in the menu (the half human silhouette icon).
   
2. Upon opening of the Actor Creator dialogue, select Import Image.
   
3. Find your image you'd like to animate.
   
4. Once you open your image, it will be processed by Crazy Talk. After that, proceed by clicking Next.
   On the next screen, you'll be presented with a set of moveable numbers from 1-4. Drag them to their respective positions. Crazy Talk 7 is pretty self explanatory and does not require a lot of detail in instruction. Once you have the numbers in position, simply click Next.
   
5. On the next screen, you may notice that there are now frames near the nose, eyes, eyebrows, head and mouth. These frames have points that turn green when you hover your mouse over them.
   You want to place these frames around each of the fore mentioned features of the face.
   
6. After that, you'll be taken to the Face Orientation dialogue. The only thing you will need to do here is, click Next. If you'd like to check out your cool work before you save it, you can click the play button in the play back menu. But, if you're ready to proceed to the save file function, just click the Export icon in Crazy Talk's main menu. There, you have a variety of choices to choose from as far as file format, video quality, output size, ect, ect.