I created a PRO Animation with Cartoon Animator 5 & Midjourney v6

Summary

Transcripts

I'm going to create a professional animation without drawing.

I don't know if this is possible because the animation can look bad.

If that happens, I will lose $300.

I will use MidJourney to work super fast.

And this might not work because A.I.

is known to make a lot of ugly mistakes.

So if I cannot draw or paint anything and the A.I.

screws up, I will lose money.

I have a story in mind, and I know how I want my animation to look like.

So let's get it started.

I want the type of animation to be like Dungeons and Kittens.

It has different backgrounds, characters on a journey.

It's really cool.

I think I can do it without drawing because with cartoon animator

you can take characters and animate them as if they were puppets.

The story will be “A Knight’s

Journey”, an adventure of a night traveling through a magical world.

The problem is that if I can't make the animation look professional,

I will lose $300. Why?

Because of my tendency to challenge myself.

It all started with a call I had with someone on my team.

Now I have an idea, why it won’t work.

I can tell you why it won't work.

Noooo! Because...

Because they have this effects when there's, like, a blob is going.

The flames.

Like when the cat has those flames, you have to draw that.

That's the part where I was like, “Hey, you cannot draw”.

I think I can get something done

without without drawing. A.I.

is really advanced now.

My confidence to animate without drawing comes from using the power of A.I.

AI can help beginners who can draw or paint well.

Before we continue, I had an interview with my mentor, Howard Wimhurst,

a professional animator who creates amazing work, and he is strongly

against A.I..

The people who are behind this wave of A.I.

apps, they seem to have no moral qualms with just trampling

over an entire industry and an entire art form.

They will use and abuse artists,

and they seem to be sleeping peacefully at night with the knowledge of doing that.

The problem is that engineers took copyrighted

work from artists and used it to train to air.

My friend Yulia was affected by this.

They took all her work without her permission.

Now anyone could create art in the same style as her.

This enabled anyone to potentially steal customers from her.

Luckily for her, there was some updates in engines

like Dall-E 3 that allowed her to opt out her art.

Also, this update doesn't allow you to create art in any copyrighted style.

Nice.

With her permission, I tried to create a dragon

in her style and Dall-E didn't let me.

And when I tried the same me me journey, their creations didn't

look as if it was made by her.

So I call that progress.

I believe A.I.

is not perfect, but it's heading in the right direction, so I'm willing to use it.

But there's a challenge when it comes to telling a story.

Like, when you do a close up and you show like, emotion and stuff.

You have to have those

eyes or the mouth like or like something like that.

I don't think it's possible without drawing.

I'm 100% sure that it's...

even like the emotional expressions; that’s

exactly something that is a challenge.

But I think I can achieve it.

Let's see. Let's see.

But even though I might lose, I still want to give it my best.

Because if I can animate without drawing, then you can do too.

It won't matter if you can draw or not.

Just like the evolution of people working with numbers in the past,

mathematicians had to do everything in their head and on a piece of paper.

Then came the calculator that helped.

And then now computers are using spreadsheets.

And because of this, now anyone with a computer can do

very complicated calculations using a spreadsheet with A.I.

Creative people who can’t draw.

We'll be able to create cool animations.

I have students who are book authors who want to animate their stories.

Teachers who want to make their classes more entertaining for their students.

So this could change the world.

Places like Building Dreams Foundation could use this to create amazing stories.

BDF is a foundation I joined a couple of weeks ago,

and what they do is that they rescue kids from the streets in India,

give them food, shoes, clothes and proper education

so they can later make their dreams come true.

Imagine those kids with their awesome imaginations

creating professionally animated stories.

It would be so awesome.

So to really push myself, I proposed this.

How about a challenge?

Because I really want to go all in in this.

I made a deal with him, and if I can animate professionally

without drawing, I win and he will pay me $300.

And if I lose, I will pay him $300.

And he agreed.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

But there’s just one thing.

Who would decide like, you win or you lose.

Who would decide that? Me.

That’s chating! Okay, to...

To make it fair, let's bring judges from outside.

I'm thinking my friends, Julio and Mundo from Alchemy.

Your friends.

They are brutal and honest with their feedback.

Okay, yeah. It works.

I need to set a standard.

They are professional storytellers and filmmakers.

They work with big clients like Amazon, Universal, Warner Music and IKEA.

I'm probably digging my own grave on this one

because they are incredibly brutal with their feedback.

I also reached out to Howard and he agreed to see the finished result.

In any case, Aditya and I agree.

If I win, I get $300.

If I lose, he gets $300.

And my friends from Alchemy and Howard Wimshurst, we'll be the judges.

But wait, before I start.

Here are the parameters we set.

I am not able to draw or paint anything.

And if I do, I will lose $300.

But I can use tools that don't require me to draw anything.

This means that I can use After Effects with some elements from Mr.

Horse Motion Array for cool animated elements like dust

or fire or energy balls.

And also I can get music for this story.

I can use MidJourney,

which will be the place where I will create most of the artwork.

And finally I can use Freepik for extra elements I might need.

And now time to work!

The first step I take in producing

an animation is having a clear idea of what I want to animate.

In this case, my standard is set pretty damn high

when I picked Dungeons and Kittens.

I spent hours on YouTube exploring for different animations

and this one is pretty cool.

It was inspired by Hayao Miyazaki.

I found it fascinating and I plan to use elements from these two.

Like those flying creatures you see?

So I have the idea.

Now the next step is the music.

I went to motion to write and looked for music

that would have a clear feeling of adventure and traveling.

After listening to several, this was the one that I picked.

Then I worked on creating the backgrounds using MidJourney,

just like in the animations I picked as references.

I wanted the knight to travel through different places.

This allowed me to visualize this story using an animatic.

All I did was take the music and the backgrounds together and boom,

I had a slideshow.

Now I had to jump in and create the characters.

With the new update in MidJourney, I was able to create really cool

characters.

For a character design, you can describe your character

and that these keywords detail, character sheet, multiple poses and expressions.

White background, character design, reference sheet.

But still, even though I was able to keep some consistency,

I needed to do some adjustments.

The problem is if I have just anything I will get disqualified and lose money.

So I had to renegotiate. Aditya.

Yes. I do need to do some retouching.

You were right. No.

But you said like no drawing, right?

So it's on you. Wait, wait, wait.

But how about this?

If they have no drawing skills and no painting skills, hear me out.

If they have none of that, they should be able to do what I'm going to do.

Because it's so easy.

In theory, it's so easy.

Okay, so how about this?

Let's test it and see if like a beginner can do it.

So now it's harder because for me to win,

I have to pass two tests.

One, I need a beginner to be able to do what I did.

And if you can't, then I lose.

If he can do it, then I win and I go to the next test.

Test number two It has to look professional like Dungeons and Kittens.

If the judges give me a thumbs down, I lose.

But if I get thumbs up, I win.

I accept and continue doing adjustments.

I make sure that anything I do can be done by any beginner who follows my steps.

I put the knight in a flying creature and then I change colors of the cape

to white. All easy to do.

So far I'm feeling confident I might be able to pull this off.

I finished the animation and now it was time to see if I passed the two tests.

If you want to see how this animation turned out,

wait until the end of this video.

Aditya, I finished the animation.

It's done.

And I want to show you some of the things that I did.

And you're going to pick the one that you believe

is the hardest to do that a beginner could not do.

Okay, let me show you.

Then.

I shared the scenes I spent the most time in and he had to choose one.

So which one do you think is the hardest?

This one. This one. This one. Okay.

All right.

Now, with the challenge selected now, we had to choose a student

who would try to do what I did.

Let's go with Selva then. Selva. Okay.

And so I had a call with Selva for the test.

If he was able to do what I did, then any person

with no drawings skills would be able to do it too.

Question Do you have experience in digital painting before any of this?

Ah No.

This first time I'm doing this, yeah.

In order for him to take this test first, he needed to spend one single day

developing basic drawing and digital painting skills.

You need the ability to paint a gradient from black to white,

then a gradient from one color to another one;

then painting a sphere with light and shadow, all very basic.

Once he passed that he was fully qualified to do the techniques I use

in this animation.

This particular scene is complicated because we have a background

and a character that doesn't belong there.

We need to do some color correction and now he will look like he's

part of the scene.

We achieve that in three steps.

Step one we add the color of the scene into the character.

Step two, we add the shadow. Why?

Because if you notice, he's walking on this kind of bridge

and that is his shadow.

So it doesn't make sense to have the legs like that.

So we need to add shadow on him.

So he looks like there's some kind of shadow

projected from some building that we don't see in the scene.

And that will be these look and these way he looks more

part of the scene and finally, step three, we add fog. Why?

Because if you notice, the background has a little bit of fog

and also there's a little bit of fog in here.

And that's why if we add a tiny bit of fog on his feet,

now he's going to be completely part of the scene like this.

Do you notice?

So he tried step one and was able to do it easily.

Perfect. You have step one?

Yes, knew you could do it.

I love it.

Then I explained the next step to add a little bit of shadow.

That one was a little bit more complicated.

That's step two. Do you think you can do that?

Yes, I can do it. All right, let's do it. Okay.

So even though he would

was a little bit hard, he was able to do it without any problems.

That's it. That's it. Really soft.

We're done.

Yeah. Okay.

Now we need a last step.

I explained step three to add the fog.

And then I asked, Do you think you can do that?

Yes. Okay.

All right. All right, let's do it.

Then he was able to do it perfectly.

We've got it.

Yeah, that's good.

Can you tell me which one was harder?

Like painting the sphere or doing these steps?

The sphere was a little bit harder. Right?

Once you understand the sphere This is an easier.

Right?

That's exactly.

That's exactly why I am so excited about this.

So these was clear proof that anyone can do this.

You might need to sit down for one day to do the gradients and the sphere,

but really it is useful digital painting skills to have

if you want to do animation.

This allows you to adjust any character you get from the Internet or from A.I..

Great. So far I have passed one of the tests.

I managed to create an animation without drawing.

I mean only doing small adjustments that any beginner can do.

Now I just have to pass the second test, and that is to show it

to professionals, my friends, and they will compare my animation

with Dungeons and Kittens as the standard, and they will give me either

a thumbs up or thumbs down.

I'm feeling pretty optimistic and excited because imagine if I get thumbs up.

That would mean that now,

thanks to A.I., anyone can create professional animations.

The kids are Building.

Dreams Foundation will be able to animate awesome stories and the teachers

will be able to create education that is super entertaining and engaging.

These will definitely change their world.

But if I don't make it, if they give me a thumbs down, then

I like to think on Nelson Mandela's quote I never lose.

I either win or I learn.

Well, I can tell you learning when you lose hurts.

So I really want to win.

Thumbs up could change a lot of lives

and thumbs down would cost me $300.

So Howard was not willing to comment on my quality.

He didn't want to give me a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Instead, he had this to say.

If I don't critique the visuals of an animation and instead critique

the unethical practices that are being done against animators,

if I maintained that that is my issue, that is my agenda here.

It is not about whether you can or cannot make a static looking imagery with A.I.

Of course you can.

The images clearly have an esthetic value.

Now, the thing is, you don't own those images.

That's the major thing.

That's does it.

Whether it's good or bad, you don't own them.

I will be posting the interview I had with Howard about the ethics of A.I.

in a later video.

So now I'm waiting on my friends from Alchemy.

Okay.

Finally, Julio from Alchemy had a chance to check the animation.

Compared with Dungeons and Kittens.

And now he's going to give me the verdict.

I can't stop but think

what winning would mean to a lot of people around the world.

Okay, I can tell you

this was not what I was expecting.

And I can tell you it doesn't feel good at all.

So because of that, I have a very important question

for someone, really important.

What do you think of the animation?

yeah.

This guy brings my mood back,

so I have one thumbs down.

Then the next one could be maybe one thumbs up.

Okay, I'm on my way to show this animation to my cousin Mundo from Alchemy.

I'm nervous because he's really strict, and I don't know what he's going to say

about it. So let's see.

He check the animation

and then he and his dog will be giving me either a thumbs up or thumbs down.

If I don't get this one, I will lose and I will have to start all over.

What?

Even the dog gave me paws down.

I just lost $300.

“I won!” If you're interested, you can check the animation

in the description below.

Subscribe if you want to see the next challenge.

Remember, I never lose either win or I learn.