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So then you’re ready to play your animation. Even in its rest-state, the portrait moves slightly and blinks occasionally, which looks quite unnerving, but that’s nothing to what happens when you click the play button. If you are of a nervous disposition, and are the kind of person who gets nightmares after watching Dr Who, then you may want to reconsider at this point, because you may run away screaming as soon as you see what it does to your face.

The actual synchronisation of sounds to facial movements isn’t too bad, although it produces very odd contortions for some consonants. The problem is in the way it moves. The facial animation in CrazyTalk uses the same morphing system as Reallusion’s other product Face Filter Studio 2. It simply pushes areas of the image around to produce the illusion of 3D motion, adding colour-matched eyelids for the blinking animation, but it’s what it does to the mouth that is the most disturbing. Unless your sample picture has a neutral expression with the lips closed, and preferably with the face straight on to the camera, the program often misses the mouth entirely, producing a terrifying-looking gash across the upper lip instead, with both sets of teeth attached to the lower jaw. It really is quite horrifying to see. No amount of tweaking with the available controls was able to correct this satisfactorily for the sample portrait of myself that I used to test it. It’s worth noting that the default sample picture used in the intro and on the pack art is of a very beautiful model with a perfect symmetrical face looking straight into the camera, and even her demo animation doesn’t looks all that convincing. The other sample demos, involving children and animals, are even worse.

Verdict
CrazyTalk 4 costs around £30 to buy from online retailers, and to be honest I think even that is too expensive. It is of limited use, it’s almost impossible to produce results that aren’t horrifying to watch, and for a program primarily intended to match up sound with facial movement its restriction to PCM WAV files is a bizarre choice. Unless you enjoy freaking out your friends I can think of better ways to spend £30.

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