Hello everyone,
I’ve been experimenting with HeyGen over the last few weeks to create training videos for our customer onboarding, and overall, I’m really impressed with the voice cloning and the natural-looking avatars. However, I’ve hit a consistent snag that’s making some of our videos look a bit off, and I’m hoping someone here has found a workaround.
The specific issue is that the avatar in my videos keeps inserting these small, repetitive head nods at odd moments—like during a pause or even in the middle of a sentence where emphasis isn’t needed. It doesn’t match the tone of the script, which is meant to be calm and instructional. It almost feels like a default animation that’s being triggered automatically, and I can’t seem to find a setting to control or minimize it.
Here’s what I’ve tried so far, without much success:
* Adjusting the “Expressiveness” slider in the video settings. Lowering it did reduce some hand gestures, but the head movements persisted.
* Rewriting the script to have shorter sentences and more natural pauses, thinking it might be a pacing issue.
* Testing different avatars, both male and female, and the issue seems to be present across them, though slightly more pronounced in some.
My current workflow involves writing the script in Google Docs, pasting it into HeyGen, selecting the avatar and voice, and then generating. I haven’t used any custom audio uploads for this project yet.
Has anyone else encountered this? I’m wondering if:
* There’s a hidden setting or a best practice for script formatting (like specific punctuation) that influences these non-verbal cues.
* This is a known quirk with a particular voice model, and switching to another might solve it.
* The only solution is to use the “Advanced” editing features to manually trim or re-generate specific segments, which is time-intensive.
I’d love to hear if the community has any insights or has found a reliable way to achieve a more neutral, composed posture for the avatar. Getting this right is important for maintaining a professional tone in our materials.
Thanks in advance for your help.
~Jane
Stay connected
Ah, the uncanny valley of vendor-default AI mannerisms. This isn't just a HeyGen quirk, it's a systemic issue with these platforms where "lifelike" is often just a euphemism for "pre-programmed with a limited set of human tics."
Your troubleshooting confirms what I've seen: the expressiveness controls are usually a blunt instrument focused on limb movement, while the subtle head and eye movements are baked into the avatar's core "personality" or tied to the speech synthesis engine's punctuation parsing. Rewriting scripts to manage an AI's tics is a rabbit hole you don't want to go down. You'll end up with stilted, unnatural copy just to appease the animation algorithm, which defeats the entire purpose.
A couple of avenues you might not have exhausted:
* Check if there's a "motion style" or "presentation style" selector buried in the advanced settings, separate from expressiveness. Some platforms have a "calm" or "neutral" preset versus "enthusiastic" or "conversational."
* This is going to sound counterintuitive, but try feeding it a script with *more* varied sentence structure, including a few deliberate rhetorical questions. The engine might be interpreting your calm, instructional monotone as a signal to insert "engagement" nods to simulate listener feedback. Forcing it to parse different sentence types can sometimes redistribute the odd movements.
* The nuclear option, if the platform allows it, is to generate the video without voice first, then add the audio track separately in a simple editor. It's more work, but you break the direct link between speech pattern and animation.
Ultimately, you're fighting against their secret sauce. That slight, repetitive motion is probably their solution to avoiding a completely frozen, zombie-like avatar, and they likely consider it a feature, not a bug.
MQLs are a vanity metric.
> The expressiveness controls are usually a blunt instrument
Spot on. It's like trying to tune a server by only looking at the CPU graph and ignoring memory - you miss the whole picture. The subtle stuff is always in the background process.
That tip about a 'calm' preset is a good one. I've found sometimes those options are hidden under a "behavior" or "animation profile" menu, not where you'd expect. The script hack is clever, though I wonder if adding more variety just teaches you to work around the quirk instead of fixing it. Might be the only option we have for now, though.
Has anyone tried exporting the raw animation and editing it in another tool? Or is that way too much work for a training video?