Creative Agency leverages Headshot Character Creator to animate Jeff Bezos for Community Campaign

Liam Murphy

Liam Murphy is a versatile multidisciplinary designer with a career spanning graphic design, 2D and 3D animation, concept art, VFX, Experiential design, Product design, and motion graphics.

He received a strong educational foundation in Art direction from George Brown college, and has gone on to work for Brands and studios like Tokyo Smoke, Tendril, Momentum and Angry Butterfly. His animation work showcases his ability to infuse cinematic styling into his work in motion design.

As 3D Art became more integral to the Advertising industry, Liam transitioned into this space, using his animation, and design expertise to create awe-inspiring Motion Graphics for his clients. Throughout his career. Liam has pulled inspiration from Movies and Cinematic CG trailers such as the work from Axis Studios and Blur.

Liam is currently working as the 3D and motion design lead at Angry Butterfly, independent creative and strategic consultancy based in Toronto, where he is bringing his skills in house to create a new standard for visual production at advertising agencies.

BILL IT TO BEZOS is a community service campaign for the Jane/Finch Community Centre, where Liam Murphy used Character Creator‘s Headshot plugin to animate a photograph of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to raise funds for their campaign where they raised more funds in 5 days than in the past 3 years combined.

“Fortunately, my search led me to discover Character Creator 4 and iClone 8, which turned out to be a perfect match for the project. The software’s impressive speed and stability allowed me to keep up with the numerous revisions that came our way, ensuring we were able to make the most out of the resources we had available.”
Liam Murphy – Lead 3D Artist, Graphic Designer, 2D/3D Animator, VFX

Q: Hello Liam and welcome to the Reallusion Feature Stories. Please share with us what the Bill it to Bezos campaign is, and why you decided to use Character Creator for this project?

Bill It to Bezos is a community service campaign done for a Toronto based community organization the Jane/Finch Centre, The campaign used Twitch to raise funds by leveraging the Free $3.50 benefit for first time Amazon Prime subscribers. The community center became a Twitch streamer, allowing Prime users to donate their free $3.50 to help support the Jane and finch community.

From the outset of the project, it became evident that Jeff Bezos was the ideal spokesperson for this modern-day Robin Hood story. However, a significant production challenge loomed: finding a solution to create a high-quality CG double that could be easily animated for speaking scenes. VFX custom character pipelines proved to be too time-consuming and expensive, while other competing CG Character software lacked animation features that met our specific needs.

Fortunately, my search led me to discover Character Creator 4 and iClone 8, which turned out to be a perfect match for the project. The software’s impressive speed and stability allowed me to keep up with the numerous revisions that came our way, ensuring we were able to make the most out of the resources we had available.

Q: The Bill it to Bezos won your creative agency Angry Butterfly, many marketing awards including CLIO Awards, The ONE Show, and D&A&D, along with others. Could you talk more about how and why this campaign could win so many awards?

To even be considered for an award, numerous factors must align perfectly. Award-winning creative ideas, while often the most innovative and impactful, can also be the most challenging to sell to a client. Fortunately, our partnership with the Jane/Finch Centre provided us with amazing freedom on the project, allowing us to pursue an unconventional and creative idea that instantly caught the eye of award judges.

The success of the campaign was heavily influenced by the production process. As a non-profit community organization, our client required us to be highly strategic with our resources. To meet these demands, we decided to handle almost all aspects of production in-house. Utilizing the Reallusion suite of software proved instrumental in achieving our creative objectives seamlessly within the given circumstances.

https://clios.com/awards/winner/creative-commerce/jane-finch-community-centre/bill-it-to-bezos-138336

https://www.dandad.org/awards/professional/2023/237593/bill-it-to-bezos/

Q: For the campaign, you animated Amazon founder Jeff Bezos by using a photograph of him with Character Creator’s ai enhanced plugin Headshot. How easy was it to create this animatable character?

The process of creating Bezos was incredibly straightforward. First I looked through the internet for images of the subject that were suitable for Character Creator. Inside I used Headshot‘s PRO settings to import the image and tweak the features of the head and face.

The whole process took me under an hour.

Q: Once your Character Creator avatar was ready, you then proceeded to animate it with iClone and its automatic lipsync feature, AccuLips. Can you describe the workflow of animating with iClone and the benefits of using iClone versus using other tools?

Once our avatar was created in Character Creator, we seamlessly imported it into iClone using the export function. Since we only required the character’s bust for the campaign, I dressed the character appropriately and set up the camera for a headshot.

To focus on the character’s dialogue, we proceeded with animating the talking sequences. Once we had the Voice Over audio ready, I processed it and imported the audio into iClone’s AccuLips to generate the corresponding script. After making a quick pass to edit any highlighted errors, I aligned and applied the corrections.

iClone’s ability to condense complex animation tools into a stable user-friendly package was a game changer for the project. Before AccuLips a similar animation pipeline might have involved facial rigging and motion capture or simply hand keyframed animation. With the time constraints and the staggering amount of versions and revisions often involved in voice over work, these other workflows would have had severe implications for the production schedule, and would have limited the entire scope of the project.

“iClone’s ability to condense complex animation tools into a stable user-friendly package was a game changer for the project. Before AccuLips a similar animation pipeline might have involved facial rigging and motion capture or simply hand keyframed animation. With the time constraints and the staggering amount of versions and revisions often involved in voice over work, these other workflows would have had severe implications for the production schedule, and would have limited the entire scope of the project.”
Liam Murphy – Lead 3D Artist, Graphic Designer, 2D/3D Animator, VFX