Be Your Other Self with Headcaster
Skwigly
Available for free on the App Store and Google Play, Headcaster from HeadcastLab is an animation app that allows users to voice their own animated avatars to be sent out to friends or via social media. There’s over 40 characters to select from, from fire-breathing dragons and kooky aliens to dancing robots. Once they’ve chosen from an array of 40+ characters, users can bring theirs to life by recording a message which will be instantly lip-synced. Then at the press of a button you can share your 30-second creation via private message, broadcast it publicly in the app or share as video through Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
Headcaster has been developed by an experienced team that includes former caricaturists, voice artists and engineers from classic British comedy Spitting Image, as well as talent from the worlds of animation, digital media and gaming.
We’ve got a huge range of characters on the app covering 2D, 3D and hybrid animation techniques. These allow us to work in various genres – from caricature to sci-fi, cutesy to horror, photoreal to toon. The creative challenge has been to develop a platform and pipeline with enough flexibility to incorporate all this variety, without losing quality or speed of turnaround.
Using a standardised timeline in 3ds Max and a custom Character Development Kit within Unity, the animated components are repeatable – emotions, ‘star’ moves, Ins and Outs, user interactions and camera moves are present in all the characters – however how the animations are used is completely different and this allows us to draw out the personality of each of the characters.
The results speak for themselves – over 40 fully interactive characters with over 60 minutes of animation produced in 6 months with a core art team of only 4. To hit this number we’ve used a combination of characters designed specifically for the app, plus characters integrated from other stores.
We’re keen to open the platform to third party character designers, animators and rights holders, so we’ve worked hard to make the source designs as varied as possible to really test-drive the system.
-Paul Mulraney, Creative Director
Headcaster from HeadcastLabs
It’s simple. People empathise more with animated characters than they do with video or text, so we give them a high quality, highly interactive tool to use for messaging, and watch the engagement grow.
-Chris Chapman, CEO of HeadcastLab
Learn more and download the app at headcastlab.com/headcaster