Lego Indiana Jones

Lego Batman / Lego Batman V2

Park Ranger Sam

Jamaican Smiley

Yellow Smiley

Kool-Aid Man

This is a great lesson plan that I found from the 'Teachers Pay Teachers' (TpT) website. The lesson includes two Lego puppets and all of the instructions you need to teach a lesson on using Character Animator with your students. Click on the button below to view. ($10 to purchase a digital download).

This was my first attempt at Adobe Character Animator: 'Albert Einstein talks about the history of KSC's Pad 39A'. This video was created only with Adobe Character Animator, and discusses the history of launch pad 39A, from Apollo-era Saturn V launches, to the Space Shuttle program, and to today's work by SpaceX launching Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, including the recent launch of Crew Dragon Demo Mission 1 and the iminent return of U.S. astronauts launching to space from U.S. soil.

This was a great start to learning Adobe's Character Animator app. On to project 2!

​I was really excited to learn the new "characterization" tool in Character Animator with this lesson. So I found a portrait of James Oglethorpe (the founding father of the Georgia Colony in America) and used that to create my puppet. I found the teacher's guide for the WebQuest and decided to create a short introduction video for that WebQuest lesson. (The raw video created with Character Animator is below.)

I went a little beyond and took the Character Animator video and incorporated that into a full intro video that I created using TechSmith's Camtasia 9 (video below). I pulled a royalty-free audio file from YouTube and used some of my own iconography (Group 1 IDT) to fully develop the intro video, then I uploaded that to YouTube and edited the closed captioning.

This was a fun assignment and I will certainly work on developing some more "puppet" characters for other instructional design projects that I am working on, now and in the future.

This is my second "puppet" and scene using Character Animator's "characterization" tool. I received some inspiration from a fellow learner in the "Animating History" course (Kristin and her Cocker Spaniel as a "historical figure"). I thought that trying to embed a puppet into C. M. Coolidge's "Dogs Playing Poker" paintings would be a lot of fun! This is a full art history lesson, produced with Camtasia 9 and uploaded to YouTube with Creative Commons attribution.

Well, I really enjoyed this course! I went ahead and decided to learn how to develop my own CA puppet. I followed along with a YouTube video from Dave Werner of the Adobe Character Animator team. The video is titled ​Building Your Own Animated Face - ARCHIVED (Adobe Character Animator Tutorial) and it shows you how to build a puppet from scratch using Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.

I created my puppet on Photoshop after downloading the template files (blank and mouth templates) from the ​"Okay Samurai" puppets page. I also downloaded the backgroup image pack from the ​Adobe Character Animator page.

So here's my ​finished video (below), uploaded to YouTube. I followed Dave's step-by-step guide and added to the finished puppet with some additional effects (like the tie). I recorded myself singing "Just the way you look tonight" by Frank Sinatra, then finished the video production with Camtasia 9 (adding the music, transitions, and other annotations). Thanks to all the staff for putting on this course! Great job inspiring the creativity in all of us! ~ Michael Shimer

And here's a fun little video I created in the same way, as an intro to my wife and I heading out later this year for our full-time adventure in our RV! I used the same puppet, just modified in Adobe Photoshop to be a park ranger. I may use this puppet to narrate and document some of our travels in the future. Good time are a comin'!