I’ve always been curious about what’s possible when creative ideas meet emerging AI tools. As a software developer at heart, I recently tried something different: animating a static, hand-drawn character using AI.
The idea started with a question from Bose, the son of legendary Indian cartoonist Toms, known for the iconic Bobanum Moliyum (Boban and Molly) characters. “Can we bring these characters to life using AI?”
That question stayed with me.
🧭 We experimented with different tools over time, but nothing really made the characters come alive — until now. This weekend, I tried with Google Flow, an AI-powered filmmaking tool. It’s a kind of visual pipeline builder for AI workflows — and which use Veo is a generative AI model developed by Google DeepMind that specializes in video generation.
Veo is designed to generate video clips from either text prompts or images. In this case, I used an image — a hand-drawn sketch provided by Bose. Getting a good result wasn’t automatic — I had to carefully write a detailed prompt that explained what the character should do, how it should move, and the overall feel of the scene. It took a lot of trial and error — and many, many prompt tweaks — I finally got something usable, and I’m sharing the result here along with a few images from the process.
🧪 The result surprised me:
- The animated output preserved the original face and body structure of the character.
- The movement felt consistent with the character’s posture and proportions.
- It wasn’t flawless — but it was the closest thing I’ve seen to animation generated from a raw sketch without needing any manual frame-by-frame work.
After generating a few short clips, I used the Studio app on my phone to trim the segments, stitch them together, and add basic audio. The whole process took a few hours — no editing suite, no animation pipeline, just curiosity and a few tools.
💬 I know there are professionals out there using dedicated animation tools with more control and better output. This experiment wasn’t trying to match that. It was simply about testing what’s possible — using the tools that are now becoming accessible.
The pace at which AI models like Veo are evolving is exciting. For someone like me, who isn’t in animation but likes to explore tech out of interest, it’s amazing to see this kind of result from a weekend project.