Bio: Jovan Popovic is a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems. After receiving bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science in 1995, he attended the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned a doctoral degree for his work in computer animation and geometric modeling. He was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Seattle to join Adobe Research in 2008. Since 2013, he has steered the vision, architecture, research, and implementation of the Adobe Character Animator, a new software product for performance-based animation.

Abstract: People love stories. Pictures allow for engaging storytelling but this is still an expensive and exclusive art form — visual stories remain difficult to create. Editing a single image or a video clip has historically been easier than animation, where keyframe synthesis dominates despite its dramatically high costs. In this talk, I will describe my efforts to make animated storytelling more accessible. Some of this work has been featured in Photoshop and Illustrator, used by startups (3Gear Systems/NimbleVR, now Oculus; Mixamo, now Adobe; and FaceShift, now Apple), and, most recently, within Adobe Character Animator, a system for performance-based animation.