With a little help, you, too, can create your own Talking Head. Soon your face will be reading the on-line version of the USA Today to people you've never met. Eerily exciting, isn't it?

Each Talking Head is a series of ten frames, each featuring basically the same image, but with a different mouth shape and expression. Each frame is 69x69 pixels in size. Therefore, the size of the entire image is 690 pixels wide by 69 pixels tall.

Considerations for creating Talking Heads:

• Exaggerate the mouth and expression. Remember, each frame is only displayed for a split second.
• While the background may be any color, light grey is more consistent with the overall look of the program.
• Mimic the expression and mouth shape of the examples provided to you. That is, the first frame of your Talking Head should look as if it's saying the same thing as the first frame of the examples.
• Save the completed image as a GIF.

The last step is to create a VOI script. This is a simple text file which, when loaded, tells HELP Read which Talking Head image to load. An example is toy.voi, which loads the Talking Head displayed at the top of the page:

You can play with the volume, pitch and speed of your Talking Head. The range of each setting is from 0 to 12. Higher numbers are louder, higher, and faster.