Recently, Marvel launched the TV show Secret Invasion on Disney Plus. In an interesting twist, they used AI animation for their opening title sequence. Judging by the flickering nature of the animation, it’s quite likely they used Deforum within Stable Diffusion. Alternatively, it could’ve been direct image-to-image generation. But either way, it’s clear that a great deal of human work has gone into the animation.
Animating with AI might sound like a walk in the park, but the reality is it takes a lot of trial and error to consistently get good results. Contrary to what many anti-AI folks think, there isn’t a single magic button that instantly produces amazing art. Deforum is a handy tool in Stable Diffusion that lets you set prompts at different points in the timeline and control a ‘camera’ in 2D or 3D space. The user interface for controlling these isn’t the most intuitive, but after some messing around, I reckon I’ve got the hang of it.
Here are some experiments I did and posted on my TikTok: