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Lost dreams.
Lost dreams is an animation project I completed for a class while studying at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The core concept of this project was to integrate novel AI image generation tools with traditional digital character animation to streamline the animation process and lower the barrier to entry. Stable diffusion was used to generate backrounds and the deforum extension was used to generate interpolated image sequences to create simple animated elements. The character was animatred by hand in blender using the grease pencil tool.
The animation itself is set to the song fantasy by DYE, a song about losing sight of one's dreams.This idea is reflected in the journey the character takes in the animated sequence, falling into a dreamscape and becoming frightened by outside attention and scrutiny before finding a path back to a spark of inspiration.
Lyrics of Fantasy by DYE:
The walls so high and you won′t feel
The moon is always spying on your fears
I make it to the golden geek and fail
So then you throw your fantasy away to fade
Oh and I take, take it in vain
So I fake, fake it again
To Tokyo network stocks, I stream
All of my wasted dreams on the screen
Oh and I take, take it in vain
So I fake, fake it again
Could I not take it in vain? Oh
Could I not fake it again?
Can't I not take it in pain? Oh
Can′t I not fake it again?
I've sent my heart away, like heroes in the rain
I've sent my heart away, like heroes in the rain
I′ve sent my heart away, like heroes in the rain
I′ve sent my heart away, like heroes in the rain
plan and storyboard.
At the start of this project I had no experiance using AI image tools and very little experiance with animation, despite being a big fan of animated movies. I knew I needed to simplify things as much as possible to keep the goal of having a complete animation in sight. To this end I wanted to avoid realism and focus on something more abstract. I also felt this played to the strengths of AI image generation as the images it produced were often slightly uncanny, especially when used to interpolate animated sequences. The character design was also kept intentionally simple to save time and avoid the uncanny valley.
Here you can see the steps of creating a simple walk cycle used in the latter half of the animation.
Backgrounds and AI.
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The backgrounds for the animation were all created using stable diffusion version 1.5 - a locally installed AI image generation software. In addition to the base model I used a lora (a more specific dataset) called abstract chaos that created much more surreal images some of which are evocative of nightmares you might expect to see in the sky of a painting by beksinski.
The Deforum extension was used to generate a sequence of similar imagesfrom a prompt and interpolate between them, creating these slightly strange morphing animated elements.
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Using AI image generation did create its own set of challenges, many of the backrounds had to be edited and composited together to give the illusion of depth. Blender was useful to thjis end as it allowed me to assemple planes in 3D space to create parralax and more realistic perspective.
I think some background elements would likely be easier to create using traditional digital art skills even with a small amount of practice as cleaning up artifacts and getting disperate pieces to look coherent next to one another took considerable work.
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Overall this was a very fun project that gave me the opportunity to learn new skills and deepen my appreciation for animation as a medium and all the hard work that goes into brining even something simple to life.
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