2025-09-21 –, Main stage
Based in the heart of Manchester, Doodledo are a film and animation studio that use python for rigging and animating with Maya. We are now partnering with Niter to streamline the process of animating lip-sync from audio files using ethical AI tooling.
The first part of the talk presented by Head of Animation at Doodledo, Joe Spademan will demonstrate how simple lines of code can make big a impact in simplifying the tools and rigs for animators, from facial and hand rigs to rotation cycles connected to distance calculations as bees and ladybirds are brought to life in a 3D animation created for homeless charity Caritas.
The second part of the talk led by Niter founder Travis Ralph-Donaldson shows how this is taken to the next level by employing ethical AI practices to solve a huge challenge that Doodledo have - automated lip-sync for a non-standard character rig.
Niter have developed an app that takes audio speech recordings and converts them to natural looking lip synced face animations. These animations can be generated dynamically for a variety of rigs from high fidelity ARKit models to custom cartoon characters. All AI models have been developed and prototyped in Pytorch and the renderer plugins written in Python.
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Joe is Head of Animation at Doodledo and has been animating since his first short in 1989 - never looking back. Since joining doodledo in 2019, Joe has led the animation team through 2D, 3D, stop-motion and live-action work for truly impactful campaigns at Doidledo’s home in Manchester. As well as animating, Joe makes sure everyone else in the animation team is able to succeed, from pairing our animation team with projects that suit them to leading team feedback sessions to collaborate and learn from each other.
Travis Ralph-Donaldson is an Innovation Discovery Manager in Software and AI at the University of Manchester Innovation Factory. He is a serial tech entrepreneur and has founded several bootstrapped and venture backed startups across AI, gaming, and EdTech. His most recent project “Speacher” is a gamified AI pronunciation training app for French and Spanish which is currently being piloted in UK primary and secondary schools. Travis worked previously as a software