hjessmith

Thank you! It’s a web app, but we designed it to be mobile first. You can absolutely visit the website, take a picture, and show the animation to your daughter all on your phone.

If you do give it a try, please let me know how it goes!

That's the plan! Glad to hear DoodleMate brought a smile to your face.

That's a good question. I would say that the two approaches are quite different and bring different strengths to the table. The major strength of genAI is that it is open-ended.

But it comes with costs. GenAI video is expensive to generate, and most tools constrain your animation to a handful of seconds, not long enough to tell a real story. You can generate multiple clips and stitch them together, but then you'll run up again another limit of GenAI- subject consistency (especially with non-realistic subjects, like doodles).

It's also difficult to finely control genAI outputs, which I argue limits the creative expressivity of the human. And if you generate numerous clips to try to get things perfect, it can get expensive.

Our approach is limited by the motion/visual/audio assets we have access to. But, when we release DoodleMateStudio users will be able to upload their own visuals, record their own audio, capture their own motions, and specify their own high-level story scenes. This should be enough to let people tell expressive and personal stories. And if we get things right, it will also be a lot more fun than refining a prompt.

I hope she likes!

Please let me know how it goes and if there's any functionality she/you would want.

That's a good question. The distinction is between generative AI (which takes in a prompt or image and generates every pixel of a new video) and non-generative AI models (e.g. classifiers, segmentation models, and pose estimation models). The second category helps us to infer characteristics about the input drawing, but it doesn't try to 'recreate' anything.

We use non-generative AI models to quickly auto-rig the character when it's uploaded. In a traditional computer graphics animation pipeline this would be done by hand and would be a slow process; we use these models to speed that step up. The resulting animations don't use any AI at all(generative or otherwise).

I'm a student of good animation myself (know the 12 principles of animation by heart, got a copy of The Illusion of Life right next to my desk, etc.) and have great respect for what professional animators can do.

And while I (maybe more than anyone else) am highly aware of all the ways this tool doesn't create high-quality animation, I'm okay with it. The point here isn't to create animations that rival those of professional animators; it's to lower the barrier-to-entry to the point where almost anyone can animate their own character.

And if a tiny number of users become more interested in animation through this tool, learn how to do it the proper way, and create animations your father would approve of... well I think that would be a phenomenal outcome.

Yeah, I think that'll happen. I think it's already happening. And if someone wraps it in a terrible app with ads, makes millions of dollars, and I never see any of the money, yes I'll be very sad. But I'm trying to take a bigger perspective here. There's a lot of experience and tools that could be built off this, and I can't possibly build them all.

And if I hid the code away so only I could use it, there's a good chance no one would ever create any of those experiences. Creating a successful app requires mobile UI people, devops, designers, marketing/SEO, monetization, etc. I don't want to do ANY of that... in the land of app creation, I'm more of a Tom Bombadil-type.

This is also my first project out of graduate school. I feel like I'll probably have other ideas down the road, and maybe I'll try to monetize those ones with what I've learned from this adventure.

I’m curious to learn more.

Sounds awesome! Let’s do it.

Love the idea. Feel free to reach out if you think there’s room for collaboration.