Character Animation Pipeline based on Latent Diffusion and Large Language Models

Artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques are revolutionizing the film production pipeline. The majority of the current screenplay-to-animation pipelines focus on understanding the screenplay through natural language processing techniques, and on the generation of the animation through custom engines, missing the possibility to customize the characters. To address these issues, we propose a high-level pipeline for generating 2D characters and animations starting from screenplays, through a combination of Latent Diffusion Models and Large Language Models. Our approach uses ChatGPT to generate character descriptions starting from the screenplay. Then, using that data, it generates images of custom characters with Stable Diffusion and animates them according to their actions in different scenes. The proposed approach avoids well-known problems in generative AI tools such as temporal inconsistency and lack of control on the outcome. The results suggest that the pipeline is consistent and reliable, benefiting industries ranging from film production to virtual, augmented and extended reality content creation.