I created this caricature of Tamra Thomson, the CBA (Canadian Bar Association) Resolutions Queen. It is being used to encourage CBA members to submit, debate and vote on resolutions by the 2020 Annual General Meeting (AGM). It also provides key dates and deadlines as well as where to find information about the AGM and the resolutions.
I created the vector file using Adobe Illustrator. I made sure to structure my file accordingly to make it easier for me when it was time to import it into another Adobe program to animate. I created the different hand gestures, her eyes open and closed.
I created this caricature of Tamra Thomson, the CBA (Canadian Bar Association) Resolutions Queen. It is being used to encourage CBA members to submit, debate and vote on resolutions by the 2020 Annual General Meeting (AGM). It also provides key dates and deadlines as well as where to find information about the AGM and the resolutions.
I created the vector file using Adobe Illustrator. I made sure to structure my file accordingly to make it easier for me when it was time to import it into another Adobe program to animate. I created the different hand gestures, her eyes open and closed.
At first I thought I would use Adobe After Effects but then I learned that Adobe Animate could automate the lip syncing if I set up the character properly.
I created a separate Illustrator file with all the phonemes on their own layers. Once I was satisfied with these, I imported the file into my Animate project and assigned each phoneme the correct lip shape.
After the audio was recorded, I brought the file into my project. I used Animate’s lip sync feature to do the bulk of my lip sync animation based off the audio file. Once this was done, I went back in to fix a few parts that did not look right. Once that was done, I made the eyes blind in a constant loop throughout the animation so the caricature would look natural. Once that was done, I added some gestures to show Tamra pointing out different things in the video. I imported graphics and text to highlight key dates, deadlines and other helpful information based on the video script. Because the CBA is a bilingual association, once I was happy how one language looked I had to start over with the second language making sure they stayed as similar as possible.
The English video:
The French video:
Every year since the dates in the video have been updated, but in the fall of 2020 the audio files were also adjusted because due the COVID-19 pandemic the 2021 AGM could not be hosted in person. This meant I had to resync all of the lip syncs in both languages and realign the information to line up at the proper time with the new scripts.
In the fall of 2022, I was asked to update Tamra’s look. Her glasses changed in this time and since the videos were used for 3 years in a row it was due for a refresh to make them eye catching again since.
