Nora Willett will present her FPO "Tools for Live 2D Animation" on Tuesday, 5/7/2019 at 2pm in CS 402. The members of her committee are as follows: Adam Finkelstein (adviser), Readers: Thomas Funkhouser and Wilmot Li (Adobe Research); Examiners: Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Marshini Chetty, and Adam Finkelstein. A copy of her thesis is available upon request. Everyone is invited to attend her talk. The talk abstract follows below: Live animation of 2D characters is an emerging form of storytelling that has begun to appear on streaming platforms and broadcast TV. Unlike traditional animation, human performers control characters in real time so that they can respond and improvise to live events. Current live animation systems provide a range of animation controls, such as camera input to drive head movements, audio for lip sync, and keyboard shortcuts to trigger discrete pose changes via artwork swaps. However, managing all of these controls during a live performance is challenging. This dissertation presents four tools to assist performers in creating compelling live 2D animation. To create more compelling characters, we propose three tools to control artwork layers’ swaps and deformations. First, we introduce an interactive system that addresses the problem of triggering artwork swaps in live settings. Next, another system transfers poses from an input video to a character, automatically driving new animation through pose data. We also describe a framework that augments the primary motion of a character by adding secondary motion - subtle movement of parts like hair, foliage or cloth that complements and emphasizes the primary motion. To add more details to scene backgrounds, we show a mixed initiative interface which, from a few user-drawn scribbles, extracts repetitive texture elements in an image, and supports animating them.