Conducting Virtual Animation from Voice and Gesture – AnimationConductor

This project aims at the development of new methods for modifying animations of virtual shapes and characters from human voices and gestures, mimicking, sounding, exaggerating, or correcting the pre-choreographed motion. These methods will focus on the expressive control of the temporal aspect of events and deformations and will target the modification of existing animations: re-synchronization, adaptation of amplitudes, rhythms, and patterns; as well as the extrapolation to the synthesis of new ones.
Several modalities will be studied as complementary approaches: sound recordings, gestures acquired by videos and by virtual reality tools; before proposing a methodology taking advantage of multimodal inputs.
The project aims at concrete applications for the production of animated films with the integration of computer graphics animators and professional engineers at the core of the definition and progress of the project, as well as through open-source professional prototyping.