Sarah Watling is the co-founder and chief executive officer at Jali Research (https://jaliresearch.com), a Toronto-based company that offers automated lip-sync and facial-animation software that helps users easily craft accurate-looking characters. The company’s interactive rig interface is language agnostic and connects to both proprietary and industry rigs. Applications include high-end videogames, as well as studios creating animated content that will be distributed in multiple regions and needs localization. Rather than re-dubbing existing animation with a different language, Jali can help create visuals that match the region’s language with accurate lip sync.
Photo (top): Lost Records: Bloom & Rage game
While the company’s leadership team has a background in animation, it was the videogame market that became early adopters of their technology.
“We thought that animation was going to be our first market...because of the pedigree of our founding team,” Watling shares. “We just assumed an animator, top graphics minds, their whole careers were in VFX and animation.”
It was game developers, however, that quickly recognized the need for a solution like Jali.
“They knew already that they needed something like this because of the volume of animation that they have to produce in a single game product,” she explains. “It’s not like in linear animation, where what’s in the frame is what you see. You’re having to animate from the player’s perspective, which means anywhere they look has to be finished, so any character has to be lifelike.”
The gaming business is changing, following what Watling says was a disconnect between gamers' interests and what larger companies were investing in.
“We’re coming off of that now — this overemphasis that every cut scene needs to look like a Marvel movie,” she explains. “Good graphics are awesome, but now they come with a ridiculous cost. Games now are enormous — AAA games from a total file size — so continuity of play is always at risk. Do you even have the graphics and a console to run it? Games that are being put out that people can’t move to right away because it’s got a heavy hardware contingency, so I think that we’re seeing a lot more people revert to what’s fun and trying to focus on that.”
Jali's custom pose feature
Localization is another opportunity for content creators who want their IP to reflect all the nuance that’s expected with regional dialog. Up until recently, the process took place in post, after an edit had been finalized, and the new dialog didn’t necessarily match what the viewer would see on-screen. Using Jali’s tools, content creators don’t need to disrupt the edit. Instead, they are swapping one performance with another during the production process.
“The ROI wasn’t there back then,” she says of creating region-specific content in the past. “We’re seeing a lot more animation studios adopt hybrid pipelines — engine-based pipelines — to take advantage of the iterative opportunity where you can...Direct moments as they’re happening, rather than always after the fact, or in post. ‘Fix it in post’ is not going be an expression we’re going hear much longer. You’re doing it at the same time. If you’ve made the investment to have different voice actors for the different languages that you want to sell this IP, you don’t have to re-animate that once you have that new voiceover. You actually can just lay a brand new animated track that is visually consistent with not only that particular vocal performance, but the way it should look in that language without disrupting the rest of the scene. That’s a game changer!”