Animation and Video Life

Original Go!Animate Bat Storm scene (left). iClone AI reimagined Bat Storm scene. A s mentioned in my introductory post to Building My Two Cartoon Web Series , Resident Dragon and Bat Storm, I'm also going to document the behind the scenes process for Bat Storm - starting with this post. Click the Resident Dragon link for the first behind the scenes post in that series. My Bat Storm series is an existing four part animated series I created nearly two decades ago with a cartoon making website then known as Go!Animate (now known as Vyond ). It's a little cringe to watch now but the story was strong and there was some good humor too.  My goal is to recreate the series using the ultimate cartoon making tool for dummies - generative AI. (I use the term 'dummies' in the sense that, just like Go!Animate, anyone can use AI to make cartoons). The AI Animated Cartoon Workflow Generative AI is an evolving space with different AI models being updated or emerging all the time. Reg...

An unlikely pair of Space Cargo Pilots. A nimation, specifically 2D animation using generative AI has really started to evolve into a more useful tool for creators however, character consistency across camera shots, within the same scene, is still an issue. As well, another issue I've bumped up against, as someone who makes very dialogue heavy animations, is having more than one character talk within the same camera shot.  There are a few all-in-one generative AI services that include effective tools to overcome these two issues, such as OpenArt.ai , but I wanted to see what I could achieve with completely free tools.   For image generation I went with Google Gemini because you get limited free access to one of the best image generation models, Nano Banana.  For video generation I went with Grok Imagine because it's very good with 2D animated characters and includes audio and lip sync. The output on the free plan is only  480p and tastefully watermarked in the...

From this one AI generated image I created a talking head scene with two additional camera angles using OpenArt.AI . A s a solo creator, I didn't get into animation and making 2D animated cartoons because I just love the craft of animating. I got into it because I am a cartoonist who wanted to see my characters come alive as animated cartoons. I've always loved animated cartoons and I wanted to see my own characters in their own cartoons.  While I love traditional hand drawn animation, I have never had any desire to sit down to draw and ink hundreds of drawings just to achieve a single minute of animation. Though I have created hand drawn, looping animations of 1 to 2 seconds every now and then and, back in the day, very low frame count digital cartoons. Reallusion's Cartoon Animator The Lazy Animator Guide to Animating Talking Heads in Cartoon Animator. It wasn't until Reallusion came along with Cartoon Animator (then known as CrazyTalk Animator Pro ), somewhere arou...

B ack in December of 2023 I created a video showing you how to quickly  Make a Festive Animated YouTube/TikTok Short! , about 18 seconds in length, using Cartoon Animator and ElevenLabs for a pretty good, AI generated Santa voice. The resulting Christmas message actually took me a couple of hours to create despite the tutorial video only being around 30 minutes. Create Comparable Animations in Minutes with Generative AI  Fast forward a couple of years and you can create easily comparable 2D animations with any number of image to video generative AI sites that also support audio and lip syncing. Some of the best can do full body animation, music, and character voices all in the one prompt. I particularly recommend OpenArt AI as your all in one AI tool for advanced generative AI. However if you want something that can just animate a pretty great, talking head image with lip sync, that doesn't require a lot of noodling around to find and learn all the settings, then LipS...

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....

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...