#oscars2025

ENDLESS LIST OF RALPH’S FAVOURITE PICS❤️ - AWARD SEASON 2025

This post is mostly to show off gifs but will get wordy, enjoy this tune while you read.

Did the Academy award me this... award? No. Did the henchmen who have you at disintegrator-point? Yes. And isn't that what really matters?" - Dr. Underfang

One of the ongoing hurdles for any generative AI service is that prompting up something cool tends to take practice yet most people will get frustrated if their first few attempts don't bear at least promising fruit.

The answer: Several Sizes Fit Most

A lot of services, Vidu included, Do this via templates where most of the prompting is already done for you and you just add a few words or an image reference. A menu of these builds up over time as an easy "try out" feature.

I normally don't use those, but as part of Vidu's Creative Partner Program, they gave me about a music video's worth of credits to show their Oscar templates off (full disclosure) and so I'm here to opine.

Wally looks how I feel, like, all the time.

For this one, you just dropped in a pic and whatever it was either walked down the red carpet or accepted a reward in fancy duds. This is all straight-to-the-meme type stuff, but we can still learn some tricks from it.

On the left is the result of using the painted Pizazz Jem & the Holograms character art, and on the right is the result of using the Transformer Steeljaw's animation model sheet.

The more painted and shaded look of Pizazz gives the AI enough to interpret it as a real, albeit very vibrant, person and fills in the blanks accordingly.

Steeljaw, by comparison, is interpreted with all his animation-lines in place, and with the flat coloration, gets reinterpreted as a sort of half-toon or living pepekura creature. Which is an effect you can use by using obviously-illustrated reference with live action backgrounds or prompting.

To produce a particularly unique, dreamlike effect.

But it's not super-consistent across different types of designs. Both the Baroness and Full-Boar here were flat, animation model sheets with no shading. Baroness, however, is more of a person with makeup and costuming trying to make her look like a toon while Full-Boar is a fully cel-shaded toon composited into the scene.

You can control that process more if you're controlling all the prompting, but templates don't really let you do that. On the other hand, all my red carpet pics are first attempts, while the in-scene ones took multiple attempts and tweaks to the process.

And it is surprisingly robust in what it can adapt to, even if Deadeye's doing the 'trying not to shit myself' walk because that toy's legs were purely decrative coverings for wheels, that's impressive.

Sense of scale is way off in hilarious ways, even if one assumes they're people in costumes they're like 2 feet tall.