Corridor Digital
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2026
7:22 · 5.2M views · Feb 26, 2023
Corridor Digital makes a roughly seven-minute anime short using Stable Diffusion and related AI tools, based on a technique they teach in a longer tutorial. It was an early showcase of AI-assisted animation.
HN commenters point to it as an impressive example of what AI animation could do and of VFX artists adopting AI in their workflows.
7 comments from Hacker News
I thought Midjourney was better as well, until I saw some recent videos from Corridor Crew on Youtube. For those who don't know, this is a VFX studio in LA that tries to keep at the cutting-edge of video production techniques and posts content to their Youtube channel, and they have a massive number of followers and several viral videos. They recently created a full 7-minute anime using Stable Diffusion with their own models and their existing video production gear, I'll post the links and let the results speak for themselves The actual 7-minute anime piece produced using SD: this video Behind the scenes: "Did we change anime forever?" [LINK] "VFX reveal before and after" [LINK]
> More of this, less AI The comment was great without this part. I'm sorry I'm going to go on a rant, but seeing this day in and day out really gets to me. I'm a filmmaker. AI is an incredible tool that is making VFX affordable to those of us with budgets. My friends and I are already using it in roto/comp workflows: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] (NSFW, bloody/gory - the effects look bad because we did this for a "film hackathon" and had an extremely short amount of time with no chance to fix the editing, script, lack of locations, etc. Under four hours for the VFX work.) Corridor Crew are making incredible stuff and teaching people how to do it: [LINK] this video [LINK] There's so much use by actual artists. I don't have a list in front of me, but I'll start compiling that to share next time this comes up. I am really salty about this because I am receiving hate and death threats because of this. I've had a film of mine booed in a live theater because I worked on a Blender + Mocap + AnimateDiff short film. I'm deep in the Atlanta film scene. I know a lot of the people that were in the audience personally. This was fresh off of the strikes, and the looming AI fears had people worried, so I understood the apprehension. But it still sucks to have your hard work and labor shunned like that in person. In any case, I won an award for that film. A year later, I did the same thing and everyone clapped. (It's not in my portfolio. I left a link in one of my previous comments if you care to dig.)
The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech. They've made dozens of essays and done tons of experiments showing that they think AI is going to be great for our field: [LINK] (scrub through the timelines to the end of these videos to see) [LINK] [LINK] this video Listen to them. Our entire industry pays attention to them, and they're right! [1] [LINK]
I'm not sure. I just watched "Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors" release in February, and the quality of the animation (modulo some instability in shadows) is mind blowing. this video
This is a trip down memory lane! I remember when DeepDream first came out, and WaveNet not long after. I was immediately convinced this stuff was going to play a huge role in media production. I'm a big hobbyist filmmaker. I told all of my friends who actually work in film (IATSE, SAG, etc.) and they were so skeptical. I tried to get them to make an experimental film using DeepDream. This was about the same time Intel was dabbling in 360 degree filmmaking and just prior to Epic Games / Disney working on "The Volume". I bought a bunch of Kinects and built a really low-fidelity real time version of what Intel was working on. The sensors are VGA resolution, so it's not at all cinematic. When Stable Diffusion came out, I hooked up Blender to image-to-image and fed it frames of previz animations to convert to style transferred anime. Then IP Adapter. Then Animate Diff. My friends were angry with me at this point. AI was the devil. But I kept at it. I built an animation system for the web three years ago. Nonlinear timeline editing, camera controls, object transformations. It was really crude and a lot of work to produce simple outputs: [LINK] It was ridiculously hard to use. I typically film live action for the 48 Hour Film Project (twice annual film "hackathon" that I've done since I was a teenager). I used Mocap suits and 3D animation, and this is the result of 48 hours of no sleep: [LINK] We won two awards for this. The audience booed us. The image-to-video models came out righ