It's Friday, y'all! This means its time for another pitch from the Blitz!
This piece is a scene test for a project we're code-naming Astral Annie, about a girl who comes into her psychic abilities as she moves to a new town with her military family.
While the initial project will have Annie in the 14-15 age range, this was a backstory scene I wrote years ago when this project was a middle-grade book. It’s cute, and lighthearted, and introduces one of Annie's best friends—10-year-old Otis, a ghost she met when she was 5.
This pitch allowed us to test what it would take to pull off a single scene in a single location. And let me tell you, it was harder than it sounds.
Fighting the AI for consistency was a chore.
But here are a few tips we learned along the way:
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Script with animatics - Use AI images with a scratch track of audio first. Read your screenplay aloud and make sure it hits all the right beats. Our initial script fell really short and didn't build up too much of anything. Like amateurs, we jumped ahead to running AI animations, hoping it would “fix” the bad writing. Spoiler alert—it didn’t. lol
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Talking Heads Only Needs 2 Angles - We got a little too fancy with our camera angles early on, which created a lot of issues with AI. Keeping character consistency was tough when cutting back and forth. Even though we had character LoRAs for both kids, the starting image angle with Minimax really affected how they looked in the final product. What worked? Sticking to one angle for each kid and then running them through Minimax for different emotional movements.
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Live Portrait has a "Retargeter" - Use it - When pulling Minimax movement clips into Live Portrait, always close their mouths with the retargeter. This makes the final lip-sync process look way better.
- Driver Video Tips - Jayson discovered that using a slightly lower angle for your driver video captured mouth movement more accurately. We tested with the head mount, but it was too wiggly and messed up the AI performance. A small tripod and flat lighting worked best. Also, try not to move your head too much while capturing—it causes weird artifacts along the edges.
Surprisingly, last week’s trailer was way easier than this scene. Character consistency across different locations has more leeway than cutting back and forth in the same scene.
So... maybe trailers are actually easier with AI than full dialogue scenes right now? More tests will make that clear, I think.
The tools are definitely improving, so who knows where this tech/workflow will lead. We're just excited and grateful to explore even more of it in the future.
Created, Written, & Performed by; Amber & Jwall
Audio: Elevenlabs Voice2Voice & SoundFx | FreeSounds
Music: Adobe Stock
Images: Flux ComfyUI Studio
Ai Animation: Minimax Hailuo
Face: LivePortrait w/ Pinokio
Upscale: WinxvideoAI
Thanks for being part of our creative journey—your feedback and support mean the world! Let us know what you think, and drop any questions about the project below.
🚀 Stay tuned for more pitch vids next week!
