Animation and Video Life

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...

O ne of the biggest lies in skateboarding is saying you'll give a trick attempt 'one more try.' Inevitably it never is just 'one more try' and thus the Halloween skateboarders curse was born... this spooky story tells why you should never skateboard on Halloween! Obviously this animated short was created for Halloween, based on an original script by me, and once again featuring the characters, props, and backgrounds from many Reallusion Developers in the Reallusion Marketplace. Watch the full animated short below, then read on to see how it all came together. 'One More Try...' A Spooky Halloween Skateboard Curse | Animated Ghost Story for Skateboarders Behind the Animation Inspiration and Characters Halloween (October 31st) was the starting point. I initially bought Garry Pye's new Wibble Skateboarder to test a kickflip. Then I saw DexArt's Goop Mummy , which reminded me I already owned his Josh and Tara Skateboarders. I switched immediately to ...

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...