Testing a hybrid production style

I am thinking about an upcoming story in a 2D animation style which involves dinosaur toys coming to life. I have been trying to figure out how to do it using my established characters, and it occurred to me maybe I could just do the dino toys/characters in AI with a chromakey background (blue in this case), then key them into scenes I will animate in Cartoon Animator.

So, for example, the characters (kids) are playing with dino toys, something magical happens, and the toys come to life, grow huge, and escape. Then the kids have to track down the dinos and magically turn them back into toys.

Here's an experiment with a T-Rex coming to life and exiting screen right. First I created the character in nano banana, created different poses (front/side/back), then created this animation using Veo 3.1 Fast. It took multiple tries to get this right - it kept adding details I didn't describe. It also struggled to understand that I wanted the dino to exit screen right. I had uploaded the first frame, but realized I had to also upload a final frame with just the blue background, no dino. When I did that, it worked. It's not exactly what I was imagining, but pretty close.

This took about 3 million credits, all told. 😬 Oh, yeah... and the footsteps are hilariously wrong. I would replace the sound on this clip with much better sounds.

0:08

14 comments