One of the things that made me want to go into graphic design was early Saturday morning cartoons. When I was a kid, there would sometimes be reruns of Gumby, a cartoon animated entirely through stop-motion filmmaking. This technique used a handmade set and characters instead of pencil, ink, and paper, as traditional cartoons did. The production also utilized a camera that a photographer would use to capture the scene frame-by-frame. When put together, this would give an illusion of movement. The hand-built aspect of this whole process seemed like so much fun to me as a kid. Today I wanted to recreate that stop-motion feeling with AI.
Since I was a kid, I have always drawn and loved to sketch, and often like to make up funny and offbeat cartoon characters. One such character I recently created is Macho Nacho Man. He's a cheese-sweating corn chip weightlifter. I came up with this idea from my hobbies, weightlifting, and cooking. I wanted to create a funny caricature of an extreme weightlifter and combine it with a nacho, to give the character a catchy name that was synonomis to weightlifting, being macho and a corn-chip, making "Macho Nacho". I added the cheese because it adds another element of humor, and a perfect combination for a nacho as it's natural sweat.
As someone who love animation, but lacks the many years of school and experience creating actual animation, as a graphic designer, I leaned on AI to help me.
I started out with my sketch, adding it to ChatGPT and give it a prompt to convert it to several renditions. At first I expiremented with a Pixar style and created multiple variations adjust the promt each time. I then thought back to those early Statruday morning cartoons and stop-motion animation and wanted to combine a hand-built physical object character, using construction papaer, cardboard, felt, and other materials to build a realistic version of such a character. I gave ChatGPT this promt to create the initial image.
"You are a seasoned stop-motion animation photographer and designer. Please transform this sketch into a detailed, realistic stop-motion animation style and studio lighting. The materials the subject and the background are made of should be different-colored felt, paper, cardboard, and other similar materials with a natural color palette, cut out into shapes of the subject. The subject is in an outdoor gym setting near a beach with palm trees in the background. The subject is a corn chip that's covered in nacho cheese. The cheese should also be made out of the same materials as he. He is holding a big dumbbell that's arching over his head from the weight, which is behind his head. Hands are over the bar, clasping tightly over the dumbbell bar. Cheese dripping off his elbows. More on one side. Render in high detail. The subject is facing the camera. Remove any other elements in the sketch, including the text above the main subject. Use advanced features and take your time making it."
To replicate the style from frame to frame, and apply it to the next sketch I had this hand-built style converted into JSON promt, which is a more detailed version of the promt block above. While not one-hundred percent perfect the JSON style helps align to each subsequent frame more accurately.
After I had made all of the frames, I animated each in Kling AI. Providing good prompts is essential, as it will yield better results immediately. That's why it's important to research the prompt style that will be needed for the particular AI tool you are working with. For this, I worked with Claude AI to determine the best way to animate these in Kling AI. Claude will write the prompt and give you additional keywords to use in each prompt to make the process smooth. When putting it all together, there will be some adjustments that will need to be made, but ninety percent of the prompt will generally give a good starting result.
All in all, this project took me a couple of hours, whereas the concept and execution of such a cartoon could take days or weeks to produce when done by hand. This is not intended to replace stop-motion animation as a means of creation. It is a mere extension to allow designers such as myself to achieve results that would otherwise be nearly impossible.