Hybrid Cartoon Animator 5 + AI tools

Hi, all - here's my latest, again combining CA5 with AI elements. The first story (Movie Theater Rules) is the most recent one.

In this one, the interior theater lobby background started as a stock image with no characters. I edited the image a bit in AI to suit my needs, then had Seedance animate the characters in the background. I made some additional adjustments in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, then pulled the video into CA5 as a prop and made it the background of the scene.

The blue monster's flying popcorn was also animated in AI. I had the image of the popcorn bucket, and I created the first frame of the animation with a green background. Then I had Seedance animate the popcorn flying out of the bucket and all across the frame. That took multiple tries - the popcorn bucket and the camera had to remain stationary, but AI kept moving them.

The flying popcorn scene was a bit trickier. I did the animation of the characters in CA5 and placed the AI popcorn animation on the Z axis so that it lined up with the blue monster's position.

So Officer Bob and the first row of seats were in front of the flying popcorn, then I had the popcorn animation with the green screen background, then everything else behind it. I output just the Bob/front row/popcorn layers as one video. Then I turned off those layers and output the scene again with only the background layers.

In Final Cut Pro I layered the two outputs, and applied the chromakey (green screen) filter so the green background disappeared and Bob and the first row of seats were in front of the popcorn, and everything else was behind the popcorn, creating the illusion I was going for.

Later in the video, we actually see the movie that the characters are watching, and those clips were done entirely in AI... the dancing dinos/bunny and the pirate ship scene. I inserted them into the movie theater frame using green screen again.

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