Adobe products that will help me accomplish my goal...

Hi Ken,

You can definitely do what you're hoping through Character Animator.

From what I understand of your initial request you would be looking at using a combination of Adobe tools.

Illustrator or Photoshop to create the character.
Character Animator or Adobe Animate to create the cartoon.After Effects or Premiere Pro to combine real with cartoon characters.
You could also use Audition if you wanted to have additional control of your audio.

You've mentioned only having access to the 7 day trial.

A great place to learn more about what Character Animator can do is from OkaySamurai​. Specially the Puppets and FAQ.

You'll also get a good understanding of what Character Animator can do from the Tutorials on Adobe's page

Yes - you add 4 separate puppets to the scene. You then take the audio file for the puppet and use that to compute the lipsync for that puppet. You can use the one audio file for all puppets - it won’t care. Multiple other people have done Music videos. That wookie series I think has timed movements (how to get the puppet moving in time to the music). https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/08/30/music-videos-in-character-animator-part-3/

And yes, depth ordering (and getting them to play instruments) can be a little tricky at times. But the Martin demo puppet plays a guitar to give an idea of what is possible. DanR explained it, the only gotcha being if the arms are independent and you want the upper arm behind the body and the lower arm in front of the body things get... funky. But generally its just a matter of reordering layers so the arms appear before the chest artwork, or don’t use independent arms (what I often do these days).

Hi Ken. Character Animator and After Effects are really well suited for what you're trying to do. Depending on what exactly you're trying to do, you might be able to use just Premiere, not After Effects.

I'm not familiar with Power Director, but if it's a video editor, Character Animator should be able to interface with it without issue.

As for the "arms behind the puppet", this is probably a layer order issue. A cartoon could be playing peek-a-boo or covering a cough with their hands in front of their face, or they could be putting their hands behind their head in the classic, "relaxing in the hammock" position. Character Animator is capable of both, you just need to draw the arms both in front and behind the head and use triggers to control which ones are visible at any given time.

Dan R.

CH QA

I normally chat online here in the forums so others can read it too. Just take it one step at a time.

If pre-recording, that is fine. Forget streaming (for now at least).

Next you need to think about depth and interaction between yourself and the cartoon characters. You can do one of two things. The simplest is create a scene with background artwork etc all in CH (Character Animator). You then export that as a video. Then take the video of yourself on a green screen and super impose it with your video editing software of choice. If you use Adobe After Effects or Premier Pro, CH supports “dynamic linking” which makes edits in CH appear more quickly in the video editing environment (if you have a beefy machine).

The alternative is to have 3 levels of video - background (in case you need to do pans etc), yourself (with greenscreen), and cartoon characters (with transparent background).

If you just superimposed a cartoon character over a real world background, then there would have been no need for messing around with greenscreens.

In terms of effort, it is not a *small* effort to create a puppet from your own artwork. It is not huge either. For example, if you watched that video through, there were some wookies at the end. https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/10/22/project-wookie-a-beginner-youtube-playlist/ is a series of tutorials on CH and shows how I made them from a photo. THe first puppet will take the longest, then once you have the ideas worked out you just repeat the same process for each puppet with more variations As you incorporate more advanced features.

Quite a few people superimpose a cartoon from Character Animator over a video. But you can certainly put your own character into a cartoon as well, use greenscreens. It depends on the effect you are after. E.g. here is a person in a cartoon. Ep1 Nerdish Territory - YouTube   There are lots of cartoons with people (in real world) - many do that for Livestreaming on YouTube etc.

Adobe Character Animator is certainly one way to create an animated cartoon. The video above my son did all the artwork, wrote the script etc. Obviously you can do better quality!

Do you want live streaming? If so, you can stream from Character Animator. If you want to be in the video at the same time as the other character, that can get tricky with live streaming. You can do things like hook a MIDI keyboard or foot peddles up to the puppet and pre-record little sequences or actions - then just use the keyboard/peddles to trigger those recordings later.

So I would start with working out

- Do you want it live (limited) or prerecord and edit it all together (takes longer, more control)?

- Do you want to be in a cartoon world, or want a cartoon character in the real world?

- Do you have A character in mind? You can buy some puppets, or do you want your own custom artwork?