Adobe’s Character Animator has a lot of potential for newsroom explainers or weekly update segments

One of the sessions I enjoyed the most at Adobe Max this past year was one from Adobe’s Dave Werner on Character Animator. It’s one of Adobe’s programs that most high school journalism programs probably don’t use or even have downloaded, but as I sat through the session, I feel there is just a lot of potential here for newsrooms to try some fun things for their audiences.

Character Animator is a motion capture and animation tool that allows content creators to create 2D characters and bring them to life.

I recommend you start by giving Werner’s presentation a watch here. It’s less than 30 minutes, but as you do, think about how this could translate to your newsroom. Could your staff create/use a puppet that gives the weekly news updates or announcements to your audience? Could you use the puppets to easily create explainer videos to inform your audience about different topics? Could you make an animated cartoon about school itself?

I think the possibilities are definitely there and the final Animation Production output could be uploaded to YouTube or directly to social media.

Here’s Werner’s presentation: Animated Characters for Social Media with Character Animator

If you or your staff do some work with Character Animator, I’d love to see what you come up with an even feature it here on the site. You can email me directly here.

Look forward to seeing what you come up with.