"talking head" animation object

I am looking for an animated object that can be used to look like the "talking heads" on TV, a newscaster or something like that from the waist up with moving lips.

You probably won't be able to find such animations to suit your needs on the Internet just by searching. You should find a 2D or 3D artist to help you with this. Even if you do find any animations, I doubt they'll be royalty-free.

You sometimes get these things as Flash animations in Websites. Do you mean those? (example: http://www.sitepal.com )

If so, they are available as Flash Objects, so you can buy the character you want and import it using the ActiveX Object.


If you can find a way to read pitch and volume from a playing soundfile, you can design your own system to look like it's talking.

Just create a separate 'mouth' object and make it resize.

PITCH is low = X-Size of mouth is small
PITCH is high = X-Size of mouth is wide
VOLUME is low = Y-Size of mouth is small
VOLUME is high = Y-Size of mouth is high

Depending on how low, or how high these values are, you can make the mouth expand more or less.

I must say, I'd have never figured that out. :)

Thanks a lot for the link and your ideas. Very helpful.