Direct your own Computer Generated ESL Dialogs with virtual Characters using Xtranormal

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you had the computer animation chops to create every dialog your ESL students need to learn as a little virtual cartoon?  Think that would take you hours every time?  With a new web app, you already have all the chops you need, and it takes just minutes to script, design, and render a full dialog.

A brand new website currently in Beta called Xtranormal is a killer app when it comes to grabbing ESL students’ attention with fluid CGI characters that you direct and script.  Its tagline is, “if you can type, you can make movies”, and it really is that simple.  You can even give your characters various accents, from American English to Belgian Dutch.

Yes, I know I am sounding like a gushing fanboi here (I have no affiliation with Xtranormal.com whatsoever), but, with almost no CGI experience, I took just 10 minutes to create from scratch an exact movie of a short dialog in my high school ESL textbook.  The dialog itself is hilariously bad, but its taken from a worse textbook.  Here are both the dialog and the scene I created:

Instructions For Your Own CGI Dialogs

So, how did I create this thing so fast?  Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to http://www.xtranormal.com, and click the “Make Movies” link at the top-centre.
   
2. Here, you have two dimensions of options.  You can choose to either include realistic-looking CGI people in your movie or cartoony-looking CGI people.  You can also choose if you’d like a monologue (just one character) or a dialog (two characters).  I suggest choosing a dialog of cartoonish people.  The advantage to the cartoonish people seems to be that they currently provide more options when it comes later on to animating them and giving them facial expressions and background locations.
   
3. Now we get to the meat of the website – the design stage.  Even though things aren’t really structured that way, I like to start by designing the set and characters in the scene.  To do that, click on the far left button in the group of buttons at the very bottom.
   
4. From the set design page, we can choose one of a bunch of stylized sets, from country homes to late night sports shows, to street scenes.  Click Apply when you’re doing exploring them.
5. Next, click on the third button in the group of four, to select your first character from all of the character options.  At the bottom, you can even select his/her linguistic style.  Click apply, and do the same for your second character.
   
6. Now that our set is built and our characters are cast, it’s time to write the dialog, control the camera, and direct the actors.
   
7. Start by writing some text for your first character, and then click the little plus at the bottom-right of the dialog box to get a new dialog box below it.  You can click on the picture for Actor 1 or Actor 2 at the top of the dialog box to direct who is doing the talking.
   
8. After you are finished entering some or all of your dialog, you have a chance to control the camera angles.  Simply drag the little camera icon right in between some of the text you have written, and then select the camera angle from the ensuing list.  Where you have placed the camera icon in the text is where the camera angle will change in the script.
9. At this point, you can also experiement for yourself by dragging in facial expressions, animations, looks, points, pauses, etc.
   
   
10. After you think you have put everything in place, simply click the “Action!” button at the bottom-right of the script.  It will take a little time, perhaps 1 or 2 minutes, for your scene to render.
11. When your scene is ready, press the “Play” button on the video to watch it.  Note any problems or changes you would like to make to the video, and then go back to re-edit it.  To get rid of the camera movements, actions, etc that you had previously inserted into the script, simply delete them from the text as you would any word or group of letters – i.e. select with the mouse + delete button on your keyboard.
    
12. Finally, when all is said and done, click the “It’s a wrap button”, and Xtranormal will ask you to register.  This is a good idea to do, since then you will be able to save this video and share it with the world, either via YouTube, or by using the embed code XTranormal provides.
    

For the time being, Xtranormal is in Beta and is therefore free.  This may not last long, so I encourage you to register as soon as possible for maximum benefit.

Good CGI’ing!