Animate an AI portrait: a fictional cast in a short clip

Say you built a cast the way the portrait series guide describes: five characters, one lighting setup, one lens. The pitch deck looks good. Then someone asks if the navigator can look up and breathe, just for a few seconds, for the opening of the trailer. This post follows that one request from the finished still to a usable clip, with notes on where faces go wrong along the way.

Step 1: pick the portrait that can survive motion

Not every good still is a good start frame. The start frame is the ceiling of the clip, so choose the one that gives the video model the least to guess:

• Eyes clearly visible, not half hidden by hair or a hat brim. A blink on a hidden eye is a blink the model invents.
• Hands out of frame or resting still. A hand that has to move is a hand that will be redrawn many times a second.
• A little room around the head. A crop tight on the forehead leaves nowhere for a small head turn to go.
• No lettering on badges or collars, since text rarely stays sharp once anything moves.

Step 2: send it to the video tab

In your library, open the finished portrait and press Animate. The studio switches to video and puts the picture in as the Start frame, so you do not have to download and upload it again. Pick a model there; the video model comparison explains how they differ. For a face, physical plausibility and detail matter more than speed, but speed is useful for a first test.

Step 3: ask for less motion than you want

A portrait clip has a small budget of change. Spend it on the face doing almost nothing, and on the world around the face doing a little. The motion prompt glossary has the long list; for a cast portrait, three slots are enough.

Keep the first clip short. The studio renders up to 30 seconds on some models, but a 5-second clip with one clean motion is far more often usable, and cheaper, because the price grows with seconds and resolution. You see it in the composer before you confirm, and a failed render returns the amount to your balance.

Step 4: check the face, frame by frame

Watch the clip once for the feeling and then scrub through it slowly. These are the places a face changes, in the order they usually go:

1. 01The eyes after a blink. They can reopen a slightly different shape or colour. Compare the last frame to the first.
2. 02The teeth in a smile. A closed-mouth smile is safe; an open one often grows or loses teeth.
3. 03The profile in a head turn. The further the head turns, the more the model has to invent the hidden side of the face, and that side may belong to someone else.
4. 04Small accessories. Earrings, collar pins and glasses frames drift, merge or vanish.
5. 05Skin texture. Motion can smooth the face into wax. If the still had pores and the clip does not, the plastic skin fix words belong in the still first.

Step 5: the rest of the cast

To keep the trailer feeling like one production, reuse the same model, camera move and clip length for every character, and change only the motion of the person. If the navigator gets a static camera and the mechanic a fast orbit, the set falls apart in exactly the way the stills were built to avoid.

What will not work

The face will not be locked. Even a good clip changes a character a little, and a second clip from the same still will change them differently, so two shots of the navigator may not cut together without a viewer noticing. Long or large motion, walking, turning around, talking at length, is where identity goes first. Speech that matches a script needs a model built for talking video, which you can find on the models page; an ordinary image-to-video model will move the lips without real words. And the rules of the cast still apply: animate fictional characters of clearly legal age, never a real person's photo without their permission.

Open the studio, find your best portrait in the library and press Animate to start.