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Featured Artist: Daniel Byrne, Creative Director, Puppets Magic Studio - Combining Sculpture and Performance

W hile generative AI has increasingly made inroads into the visual entertainment industry, puppetry, and puppet making has one thing that keeps it relevant, the human component, both in the creative choices of design, and how each puppet is brought to life, according to Daniel Byrne, Creative Director of  Puppets Magic Studio, who I had the opportunity to interview recently. ---o ---o--- o--- TET: Hi Daniel, tell me a little bit about Puppets Magic Studio? Where is it based and what does the studio do? We're a UK-based puppetry studio that designs and fabricates bespoke puppets for film, television and live performance. We work on everything from TV commercials and short films to stage productions.  Every project is different, so our work often combines traditional craftsmanship with modern design techniques to bring characters to life in the most effective way for the production. TET: When did you realize you could turn Puppet making into a career? Your website suggests you ...
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Getting Started on Bat Storm - Recreating My Old GoAnimate Series with Generative AI

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...
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Drawing and Rigging My First Character For My Resident Dragon, 2D Animated Web Series

This will be the definitive version of my TET Avatar character rig. F ollowing on from my introductory post to Building My Two Cartoon Web Series in this post I will be showing you the behind the scenes on the steps I'm following to draw and rig the first Resident Dragon character, TET, who is an avatar of myself. Typically you wouldn't start a web series by rigging characters but I've already scripted three of the six 2-3 minute episodes, and storyboarded the first two well over two years ago. Both storyboards are actually on my Instagram account if you dig far enough.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by David Arandle (@etourist.tet) The Easy Way to Draw Front Facing Human Characters Since all the characters for this series are pretty well defined in my Resident Dragon joke cartoons I'm able to start simply by sketching my first character in a front facing T-pose using my preferred bitmap drawing application, Krita . When drawing fro...
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Follow Me As I Build My Two Cartoon Web Series So You Can Build Your Series Too

Bat Storm and TET from Resident Dragon, Behind the Scenes on these two series. Image by Gemini AI and TET. M any cartoonists, authors, short story writers, and other types of creators find themselves aspiring to make an animated cartoon web series because, although a challenging task, it's seen to be achievable by a team of one. You don't need a big studio, a killer pitch, or a big budget, (which would all be nice) you can just start making something yourself, in your spare time, on a shoe string budget. That's what this blog, going forward, will be focusing upon. I'm going to document the behind the scenes on how I'm making my two web series, which will hopefully inspire you to say, if he can do this with almost no budget, then maybe I can too. Along the way I plan to create guides and tutorials, so you aren't just seeing behind the scenes, you also have the option of following some of my processes step by step. Full disclaimer. This is just my process. I'm...
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AI 2D Animation Challenges: Character Consistency and Multiple Characters Speaking in the Same Shot

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...
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Let's Talk About 2D AI Animation and Reallusion's Cartoon Animator

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...
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Custom Animate Your Christmas Messages in Minutes Using Any Character Image with Good Quality Lip Sync

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...
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