What a year! In 2022, we launched brand new products and huge new features for our customers and partners to grow audiences, generate digital revenue, and most importantly, create awesome animated content.

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Here are our top six launches and product releases from 2022.

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1. Launching the Aquifer Desktop app

This year, we expanded the Aquifer suite to desktop! While our customers appreciate the flexibility of the mobile app, our Aquifer creators prefer the desktop as a platform for creation, and we heard them loud and clear. In 6 months, our exceptional product team concepted the app experience, tested with potential users, designed the interface, architected the ecosystem, and built the app.

As of this Dec 2022, here are some of the top features on the desktop app
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• Scene Wizard - generating full animated scenes from audio
• Drag-and-drop animation and scene editing
• Aspect ratio selector - export videos in horizontal, vertical, or square
• Emotion composer - add moods to your generated character animations
• Import facial capture from mobile app - Motion capture unique facial expressions in mobile and import to the desktop app
• Import camera capture from mobile app - Capture unique camera movements in mobile and import to the desktop app
• Eye lock - Ensure your character looks at camera throughout animation
• Depth of field - Bring in movie magic by automatically focusing on character in scene

Want to see more? We made some detailed video walkthroughs of the features and how to use and navigate mobile import and the tracks.

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2. Scene Wizard - Making instant animation a reality  

Aquifer is already super fast; at it's heart it's an easy-to-use and flexible suite of 3D animation tools. But we realized that our customers need even faster creation. They want to act out dialogue and receive a video back, as if by magic. That's where Scene Wizard was born. Instead of opening a blank scene and then adding every element one-by-one, users simply upload or record audio and click "Generate." Scene Wizard then intelligently creates facial animations and emotions, selects body movements, and adds camera shots based on the length, tone, and cadence of the audio. To get more emotive scenes, users can manually select an emotion or mood, such as Happy, Sad, Neutral, or more, and Scene Wizard will generate accordingly.

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3. Voice Sound-a-Like (or as the kids say, voice filters)

Bringing a character to life requires a recipe of excellent character design, great animations, and of course the perfect voice.  At Aquifer, our mission is to simplify every aspect of the character storytelling process and voice is a huge part of that. That's why we integrated industry-leading speech-to-speech generative voice AI into Scene Wizard. When you generate the animations from any audio using Aquifer's Scene Wizard, the audio itself is transformed to sound like that character simultaneously. Check out Voice-Sound-a-Like in action.
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4. Emotion Composer - Automated expression layering

In 2022, our product development focused on automation, speed-of-creation, but also movie magic. For us, movie magic is the sparkle in the scene that really emotionally connects with the viewer, and the focus on cinematic results in the final movie, which is what our creators care about. Characters connect with us because of their emotive expressiveness, and we are committed to bringing that human quality to automatically-generated animations. Enter the emotion composer. We released this beta feature Q4 of this year. Users can select a mood or emotion when they generate or they can drag-and-drop moods into the timeline to adjust the generated animations.

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5. 3D celebrity personalized videos powered by Aquifer instant animation

This year, we were the technology that powered two big firsts on the personalized celebrity website, Cameo.
"True" from Netflix's True and the Rainbow Kingdom was the first-ever CG animated character on the popular video messaging site. This was big. For the first time ever, parents and kids could request any message and receive back a totally custom 3D animated video message from True herself. This was made possible by Aquifer's instant animation technology. We got excellent coverage from top kids entertainment publications, including Kidscreen, TV Kids, Toy Insider, License Global, and Licensing Magazine. True's profile continues to receive 5 star reviews on Cameo.

A few weeks later, we debuted the first Bored Ape NFT character on Cameo. As collectors imbued their prized NFT collections with personalities and voices across social media, Aquifer saw an opportunity to bring these characters out of their 2D images and into full 3D personas. We partnered with our investor, Boost managing director, Adam Draper, to bring his BAYC #9132 to Cameo to demonstrate to the world how NFT characters can be storytellers and influencers in their own right. Fans received 2-3 minute mini-movies with motivational, educational, and downright hilarious messages from the 3D PFP.

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6. Shoutouts - Early Preview (beta) launch

We partnered with top toy and entertainment brand, L.OL. Surprise! to bring six of their Tots characters onto Shoutouts, Aquifer's brand new platform for fans of brands can purchase Shoutout Shorts from their favorite characters. Aquifer technology powers the entire Shoutouts experience from ordering, to final video delivery. For each video, customers can request 10+ different customizations from names, pronunciation, any special message, occasion, and selecting the character. Check out an early preview of the experience before the launch version.