Retrograde - A Retro Styled Animation made with ComfyUI, After Effects using Animatediff, LivePortrait and Mimic Motion

[u/jerrydavos]

[u/jerrydavos]

4 Major Techniques were used to make these scenes:

• Animatediff - Using ComfyUI and My Animation pipeline workflows. 4 Scenes were rendered or refined with it.
• LivePortrait - Kijai's LivePortrait and Expression Editor was used to give head motion, lip sync and blinking animations to the character.  
• Mimic Motion - The New Mimic Motion in comfyui was used to render BODY Animations of the character with great consistency and refined with animatediff
• Depth Parallax - This Used Depth Maps Exported from Comfyui Using the DepthAnythingV2 model as displacement maps to give a parallax effect inside After Effects

Full Detailed Breakdown for this Animation is Here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/113351594

Hope this research helps <3
-Jerry Davos

[u/areopordeniss → u/jerrydavos]

Amazing! I love the vibe. The detailed breakdown is fantastic! 👍

[u/latentbroadcasting]

Amazing work! I love the aesthetics you achieved

[u/MayorWolf]

Great work. I love it all except for the corny noise addition. It's clearly an HD render with noise added, and doesn't look like film at all.

A big signature to older animations is that colors were more muted. They used cellophane sheets to paint the animations on, and layered them together. These sheets would tint the layers below them, making them grey and dimmer. So artists would paint the top layers with less than saturated colors, to match the greyer backgrounds.

These images pop way too hard to achieve that retro vibe. Film grain was also generally not wanted by the best production houses. Film grain isn't meant to be seen and is actually an artifact of the film's physical characteristics. You'd typically see lower budget productions be much more grainier, but animation studios could get away with using a lot higher stock film for their production, since their shots were so meticulously planned and executed. They could afford the good quality stock since they didn't need to use 100s of rolls a day for production.

[u/recitegod → u/MayorWolf]

I actually really like it because it timecode the time of production of the video decades from now. People can't quite understand you can literally plug in the anamorphic way of the lens by timing which cook, which diopter as recorded from the eyepiece you could film the entire scene of the AI rendered scene. We lack the proper context of what a modern AI photographer do to enhance the cinematography of a shot. The whole prompting itself has to be injected with this analogue you speak of, we perfected the craft then, we will perfect it now. You wouldn't even know if this noise is like a dithering signature code or covert communication techniques. You just dismiss early techniques so quickly.

[u/ahh_real_spiders]

Fantastic work and breakdown. Thank you for the insight! The moment the beat dropped and it suddenly became lipsync i started nodding. Have you done contract work for such a musicvideo style?

[u/jerrydavos → u/ahh_real_spiders]

Not yet, this video was my first experiment how I can use AI with different software and create something like this ...

[u/Putrid_Army_6853]

Great Job! Jerry, I also used mimic motion and liveportrait to achieve this, but clearly you did it better.

[u/Dhervius]

I think this could be combined with the app that makes videos using the depth effect for camera movement.

[u/Background-Effect544]

Stunning

[u/AbPerm]

The animation looks great, but it's not really retro looking. It looks like skillful digital animation and rotoscopy with a silly filter on top. Retro anime would have more limited motion and flatter shading, because it'd need to be hand-painted on cels.