My Experience With AI Animation and my 4 Favorite Tools

My main purpose for using these tools was animating still images from our NFT collections while building our story and lore. 

I tested out a bunch of tools and I used Runway for most of my animations.

Here' an animation done with Runway (motion set to 3 ) for the 404 birds collection.

Runway

The app often does weird shit with your images, so you have to set up your motion to low (2 to 5), or use the camera motion setting instead.

I mainly use zoom, roll and horizontal camera motions, all on low settings. Vary the motion for these options, it looks best - eg horizontal on 0,3; zoom on 0,5 and roll on 0,1.  Other options are tilt and vertical movement.

In this way the app doesn’t change your image too much but it will add enough motion to make it look cool.

Still, can be fun to see the weird shit it does with the pictures, so you can play with higher motion levels. Sometimes it turns out cool, e.g. this bird animation is done on highest setting (10):

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You can also do text to video if you don’t have an image but I didn’t like how it does that, I would prefer generating the image in midjourney then animating it there. 

There is  an option to paint over a certain part of image with the motion brush but this is better for panorama nature type of animations, like if you would want to animate clouds and leave mountains still, and I didn’t do that.

I think the price is ok for this.

I noticed they keep getting better. 

I made this music video for midnight apes collection in Runway:

Pika

Other than that I also used Pika for animation. This software is a bit better in animating characters and they also have a lip sync feature since recently which is a big thing. (The lip sinc works only with human characters, you can add your audio or use one of their preset AI voices.)

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Here's a sample lip sync video I did with an image from FUKIYU(MILADY)🌑midnight collection:

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However what I don’t like about this tool is the lack of customizing options, like the zoom, tilt and roll features in runway. **wtf they just added that too? Will they become better than Runway?!

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Another thing I don’t like is that it blurs the images, and this is true regardless of the image size. Still, I can see they are constantly developing and the price is good, and I will keep trying them out.

**they’ve just released sound effects, another cool feature.

Like runway you can do text prompts if you don’t have a pic but I don’t do that, again because midjourney and DALL-E understand me better with image prompts. 

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Basically, since I discovered two new things while writing this review I think you should definitely keep your eye on Pika. 

I animated this video of my chameleon buddies with Pika (a couple of animations from runway too, I made the song with Suno):

Leiapix

Other than that I also used Leiapix. This is a different tool - it makes 3D depth maps, which is cool if you’re also interested in 3D design.

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You can then animate these depth maps, creating effects like zoom in, dolly etc. The exports are HQ and you can make loops. This tool is perfect for stuff like animating nature scenes for webs and videos. 

I used the tool when we were creating animations for our dashboard web. It is a good alternative for Runway if you are only planning to do zoom in, zoom out, vertical movement type of animation. It is even better for that because it won’t do any weird shit for certain due to the different nature of the tool.

You can choose the intensity of animation, and the pricing is not subscription based, you pay for credits. 

The price per video comes up to be similar to Runway so that shouldn’t be your factor when choosing.

Here's the video I did for our dashboard with Leiapix:

Animated Drawings

For the last honorable mention I must say how much I love Animated Drawings. 
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I discovered this tool a few months ago but I only got the chance to use it recently with Fukiyu.

The Fukiyu art is perfect for this animating tool because it looks like a child’s drawing, which is what the tool was made for.

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The tool is very different from everything else you can find. It is specifically created to animate characters from kids drawings and that’s it. In the tool, you set up the points for the face, arm and body on your image, then you can choose one of around 20 types of motion - such as jumping, dancing, fighting and running. 

It works best with human-like body features. The app is free.

Here’s a sample drawing and animation I did for this review:

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Ok, so

My conclusion is Runway is still the most comprehensive tool and the best one to take if you will take only one. But Pika is also developing fast so it is a good alternative and even better if you are animating human-like characters. 

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If you’re like me and want to have it all, you can use each for a different task although you’ll probably have a favorite ( in the same way DALL-E can do some types of prompts better than Midjourney, but you end up mostly using Midjourney.)

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I also did a video combining animations from Runway, Pika and Leiapix and I think it creates a really cool effect combining all the tools. 

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Here’s that vid: 

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Thanks for reading my thoughts. I hope it helps.

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Your’s truly,

Archibald