AI | Characters & Animation

Tiny Garden

Character consistency is key when designing a story. When working with AI-generative tools, one way I maintain more control over the outputs is by generating characters and backgrounds separately.

In this example, for my Tiny Garden series, I created a GPT that allows me to produce characters in a specific style and material. I chose to design cute, handcrafted felt animals with visible stitches. Later, I combined them with their backgrounds and animated them using Wan 2.1 image-to-video.

Sammy, the adventurous ladybug.

Dandelion garden.

Purple

Purple is a short film I’m currently working on, styled as a wildlife documentary. The story follows a lone sheep with purple fur who embarks on a journey after encountering a flock of yellow peacocks that transform their appearance.

The main goal of this project was to explore the workflows and capabilities of OpenAI’s Sora. For the images, I used text-to-image generation, crafting highly specific prompts that described a cinematic look, the animals’ actions and characteristics, and the vast valleys where the story unfolds.

For the videos, I experimented with Sora’s storyboard feature, which combines image-to-video generation with a prompt along a timeline. Although the results varied, some of them captured exactly the gold I was looking for.

Sing to ABC

Sing to ABC is inspired by the children’s book of the same name. For this project, I relied heavily on AI tools to generate everything from the characters to the sound effects, with the goal of producing a fictional intro for an educational show.

To design the characters, I followed a workflow similar to the one I used for Tiny Garden, but this time I chose modeling clay as the main material.

After generating the first frame of each animation, I created individual image-to-video sequences using Pika 2.2, with straightforward prompts referencing claymation styles. I then composited them in After Effects to bring all the elements together in the same scene.

For the sound design and music, I prompted the cartoony bounce effects for the letters’ entrance in ElevenLabs, and generated the uplifting ukulele track in Suno.

Rana, character study.

Pax and Rana, scene study.