Following the production of a music video using Adobe’s Character Animator software in February this year, NetThreat asked Simcoemedia to produce an animation highlighting various online security issues such as malware and encrypted threats whilst offering a solution in the form of SonicWall’s Cloud Application Security (CAS).
Simcoemedia worked with NetThreat to design characters looking similar to employees Pete Kord and Sarah Lewis, both people are familiar NetThreat customers and introduce themselves within the first few seconds of the sequence. The audio was recorded in a portable booth at the NetThreat offices near Stratford (England) then sent by file transfer to be added to the animation sequence.
Using Premier Pro’s speech-to-text engine, it is possible to generate captions that can be imported and converted to appropriate mouth shapes (.srt format). Combined with.wav audio of Pete and Sarah, the captions provide more accurate lip synchronisation. Animated text was added with After Effects.
Above is episode 1 of a series of NetThreat news updates. Once a character has been rigged and basic movement triggers established, it is relatively easy to produce new episodes. Watch this space for more animated fun from Peter and Sarah. The characters were rigged, animated and imported as a Character Animator project into Premier Pro using Adobe’s Dynamic Linking feature. Any changes made to the characters within the animation software would automatically update in Premier.
