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"Trash Panda" - Pets in the City | Behind the Animated Short About a Video Channel and a Wayward Raccoon

W hat happens when an apartment-living city girl, Sarah, befriends a raccoon named Jake and starts a YouTube channel called Pets in the City ? Let’s ask her across-the-street neighbor, Bob - definitely not their biggest fan! Trash Panda – Pets in the City is my first character-driven animated short in years, based on my original script and featuring artwork from various Cartoon Animator developers on the Reallusion Marketplace. Watch the episode below, then read on to see how I made it. "Trash Panda" Pets in the City Ep01 Raccoon Life Funny Animated Cartoon Behind the Animation Inspiration and Characters I love browsing my Cartoon Animator library and the Reallusion Marketplace for characters that spark ideas, or that I find interesting, and could work well together. Pets in the City started as an experiment using assets I already owned or could easily buy. I found Sharon (later renamed Sarah) by NewBreed Artist , then a free raccoon by Prosenjit Biswas , who became Jake....
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Eleven Labs Adds AI Music Generation to its Already Impressive AI Voice and Sound Effect Generation Tools

Eleven Labs launches their AI Music Generator. S ound effects, music, and in particular getting voice actors can be tricky to source as a solo creator, or even as part of a small team, but Eleven Labs , the gold standard in AI voice generation, can now be your go to tool for all three. AI Voices You probably already knew that Eleven Labs is arguably the best generative AI site for realistic, expressive text to speech, voice cloning, and voice changing, with an entire library of voices, in multiple languages to draw upon as well.  I've personally used their tools to clone my own voice to near perfection, which you can sample in this post, Creating an AI Digital Avatar and Voice Clone of Myself with Free and Low Cost AI Tools .  I also use their library of text to speech voices in my animation demonstrations, such as when I used them in my animation demonstrating,  The Family Guy Method - Animating Talking Hand Gestures in Cartoon Animator AI Text to Sound Effect Eleven ...
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Featured Animator: Latent Space - Developing a Workflow For 2D AI Animation With a Specific Art Style and Character Design

Characters From an Animated Short, featured in a two part behind the scenes video by Latent Space . R ecently, I've been exploring how to create a 2D animation workflow that allows me to animate with my own art and characters, while incorporating generative AI into the process to do the 'heavy lifting' (basically all the traditionally time consuming stuff like the animation itself). If you've seen my previous post,  Reallusion's Cartoon Animator Versus PixVerse Image to Video and Lip Sync AI - Battle of the Talking Head Avatars , you may have noticed I used green screen (a.k.a. Chroma keying) with my AI output. This was something I did because, if you want to animate a particularly long scene, especially with lip sync, you need to string a number of generations together. This is easier to do with characters if they don't have any background in the generation - which may not stay as consistent as the character across generations. To cut a long story short, YouTub...
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OpenArt Versus Dzine: AI Consistent Character Training Compared

TET2d Avatar Image created with Dzine . R egular readers of Animation and Video Life will be familiar with my alter ego, 2D avatar character, TET, who is both the face of The Lazy Animator Cartoon Animator Tutorials, and is currently part of my Resident Dragon joke cartoon series. It is my goal to use him as an animated avatar for both my Lazy Animator video courses and my Cartoon Animator tutorials that you'll find on my @AnimLife YouTube channel . Unfortunately I don't have the time to animate him for every single project. Even with Cartoon Animator's time-saving workflow I wouldn't be able to produce animated content quick enough. Which is why advances in AI animation is something that is increasingly more interesting to me each day. Consistent Characters Before we get there I have to overcome one of the biggest hurdles in AI I've come across... reproducing my art style consistently. I don't want an approximation of my characters, I want my characters looki...
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"Art Just Needs to be Yours" - Aaron Blaise and Why Generative AI Will Never Replace Art Created and Inspired By Lived, Human Experience

Aaron Blaise. A aron Blaise, acclaimed animator and director of Brother Bear, released a video  on his Art of Aaron Blaise YouTube channel sharing his thoughts on AI generative art and animation and why AI can't actually compete with lived, human experience. Specifically why it can't compete with YOUR lived human experience. I think he makes some really great points that echo my own thinking and reflect why I didn't even blink at the implications of AI generative art when it first started becoming a thing. Watch his video below. Speaking to the video, Aaron talks about the process of being immersed in the creation of art, why that experience is important, and why that can never be replaced by a machine. He goes so far as to say he will always hand draw his animation because that personal act of doing, of creating, is what connects him to the work. To me I think it's all relative and individual preference. I find hand drawing animation tedious. If I could get a machine ...
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TikTok's 360 Microwave Meme and How You Can Use It For 2D Animated Character Turnarounds

360 Microwave Meme Stills from PixVerse. The center images are the original character images used to generate the turnarounds. T ikTok art drama, where wannabe artists, who have no clue about professional art practices, but are still happy to gatekeep their idea of how professional artists work, is reason enough to stay off the platform. I have no doubt there are a few insufferable professionals on there gatekeeping too. Case in point, TikTok's 360 Microwave Meme , which I discovered through a suggested video on YouTube called, The Microwave Art Drama Breaking the Art Community on TikTok by art drama showcaser, Mohammed Agbadi . Apparently TikTok's animation community is livid that using this effect on your 2D character to achieve a fully animated, 360 degree turnaround, is just the absolute lowest thing you can do. You cannot, in good conscience, call yourself an artist, or an animator, if you do this, and, even worse, post it on TikTok. In retaliation 'real' artist/...
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The Future of Animation? Using Reallusion's Cartoon Animator and Image to Video Generative AI to Animate Sequences

Animation software is already capable of auto generating tweens but will AI take it to the next level and tween entire sequences of motion? M y earlier article,  Reallusion's Cartoon Animator Versus PixVerse Image to Video and Lip Sync AI - Battle of the Talking Head Avatars , got me thinking about using generative AI for creating the 'tween' animation in between key poses. This isn't a new idea, and I have explored tweening with AI before in my article,  Five AI Generative Image to Video Tools For Animation You Can Try Free Right Now . That was almost eight months ago and the results were mixed and barely usable. However PixVerse AI is exceptional at maintaining the art style of whatever image you begin with and will also let you include an end frame, making it an ideal tool for tweening, so...  What if, in a future version of Cartoon Animator (or your preferred 2D animation software), all you had to do was create the key moments of the scene, and then the software...
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