Animation and Video Life

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 ...

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...

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...

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/...

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...

PixVerse's Show Muscle Effect is a real flex for other AI generative video sites. AI  generated digital avatars have improved greatly over the last 12 months, to the point where you can replace yourself with a digital, talking head, clone avatar that can say anything using your AI generated voice clone, and casual viewers wouldn't even notice. I tried cloning myself back in July of 2024 in my post,  Creating an AI Digital Avatar and Voice Clone of Myself with Free and Low Cost AI Tools . Since then, I've seen human clone channels on YouTube that I'd never guess in passing were digital humans. This is one of Hedra's better generations of video using my TET Avatar as a source. One area that has been slower to catch up is using AI to create 2D cartoon style avatars, from very specific character designs, that don't have realistic human proportions. I put my TET Avatar through Hedra , one of the best talking head avatar generators currently available, and got a compl...

I don't believe for a second that this guy is a writer. He's actually a man of few words if that blank page in front of him is anything to go by! Image by Copilot and TET. T wo and a half years ago I wrote an article,  Is Your Next Design or Writing Partner an AI? A Look at Artificial Intelligence and the Creative Arts with DALL-E 2, Jasper, and Rytr . It's worth a read just to see how far and fast Artificial Intelligence is moving. Today, while I do use AI image generators to create quick illustrations for blog posts or to create quick characters and backgrounds I can use in my online courses, it's actually AI writing that I'm finding more useful in my own creative practice. Specifically, not dedicated AI writing sites like Jasper and Rytr , that I covered in my previous article, but Microsoft's Copilot, the general purpose AI built into their Edge browser. Though I've been using the Android App version of it on my phone because it's more convenient to ...

H ave you ever wanted to send your friends and family fun, 2D animated, holiday messages, or just create 2D animated characters that you can make move and talk without learning difficult to master animation skills or spending hours drawing frame by frame? Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 is a professional quality, 2D animation studio software that is also very easy to produce impressive results with, even if you've never animated before, or can't draw. Don't Have Cartoon Animator 5 Download a free, 30 day trial . Easy Beginner Course I've created a completely free beginners course that teaches you my fast, easy way to rig and animate your first 2D custom character in Cartoon Animator 5 without complicated templates or any drawing skills at all. My online video course includes everything you need, including eight AI generated character sprite graphics, and four AI generated Human voice samples, so you can start learning right away. Eight AI generated character image...

I  first heard about Glif through a YouTube video that mentioned you could get access to Flux Pro (the latest 'game changer AI' generative image model) through the site for free. While I had a vague notion from the video of what Glif was, I wasn't expecting it to be so easy to get started with, and so good with my very first results. Glif is an easy to use, low-code platform for creating tiny AI-powered generators called Glifs. While that may not sound inspiring, what Glifs allow you to do is create a tiny app that niches down to a specific type of AI generation that the user modifies with their own inputs. The best way to really understand is with an example.  My First Glif I've recently been using VivaGo's AI platform  (free and unlimited at the time of writing) to consistently generate full body characters in a front facing T-Pose that I can rig as front facing characters in Cartoon Animator. Unfortunately it can be a bit hit or miss maintaining the T-Pose part...

LTX Studio can generate consistent characters across storyboard panels - even if one character is a dragon! W hile text to image, and text to video (and image to video) AI tend to be getting a lot of the press, the real exciting aspect of generative AI implementation is how it can be used to speed up creator workflow. Being able to realize your creative vision in a shorter length of time can lead to more ambitious projects. Particularly if you're a team of one, with a very limited budget, but you one day dream of creating your own epic animated feature film. LTX Studio (beta), a new 'all-in-one' AI film making tool, is not going to let you realize that dream from a single text prompt but, by bringing a bunch of generative AI technologies together, the developers have created a one platform workflow that can help anyone rapidly visualize and deliver a story from initial idea to finished film in days rather than weeks (depending upon how ambitious the project is). Even bette...