Since 2007, Genseisha from Tokyo, has been working on a TV series airing several times a week on Nippon Television Network named The Leaders Of The World. Featuring 200 CG caricatures of the world leaders such as Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy. So far, more than 190 short episodes of this humorous CG animated series have been produced using Autodesk Softimage.

"The project is based on creating an animation from the daily news." explained Masuda Eiko, from Genseisha. "Since the animation is on air on the evening news program, the whole production is completed within about 5 hours, from modeling to compositing and including animation."

Masuda reveals: "Each character’s face is rigged with bones and custom parameters in order to be ready for the animators to use. The body animation and the facial expression (other than the lip sync) are all manually keyframed by the animators, We are using Voice-O-Matic to speed up the lip sync process. We started with US President Obama's inauguration speech animation."

Voice-O-Matic automates lip sync animations with any 3D character rig in any language and help reduce production time drastically. Voice-O-Matic from Di-O-Matic is available as plug-in for Autodesk 3ds max, Autodesk Maya as well as Autodesk Softimage.

"Since there is never a time when a character speaks without emotion, additional 'acting' was needed in addition to the lip sync. Which included tweaking the overall shapes and animation curves as well as animating eyes and eyebrows. Our criteria for choosing Voice-O-Matic were quality, flexibility and cost efficiency. It was also very important for us to easily implement Voice-O-Matic within our existing production pipeline." reveals Masuda.

A YouTube channel featuring all episodes is available for your viewing pleasure.

In addition to Voice-O-Matic, Genseisha has also recently acquired Facial Studio (Windows Edition) from Di-O-Matic. "Facial Studio helps us speed up character modeling. Because of the tight schedule of daily broadcasting on the nightly news program, reducing the time on pre-production  allows the animators to take more time and improve the quality of the animations we produce." concludes Masuda.