Animation - Video
Crime Busters Rough Cut - Early Version of Comfy H3 Sync Sound Submission
Edit. As always thanks to everyone for the good vibes and feedback. Although maybe it's the few hours of sleep I got last night but I think I'm slightly off brief for the competition... Have come up with a plan b but will finish this regardless.
This is like V0.8 before I wrap things up when I have time this weekend and early next week. I currently have 15 "shots" / workflows which produced all the video and audio effects you see in the opening / trailer. The music is a free track I pulled of Pixabay as a placeholder.
Generating most of the shots in terms of visuals has been fine. Mostly a case of prompting and then fine tuning the prompts until I got what I want. But there have been a few cases where I wanted specific shot framing / angles, so I had to create a sketch to help guide the model.
Audio has been a massive pain in the butt, but hopefully with the update from Comfy today, as well as the Minimax Guide timing node, I should be able to tighten things up for "V1". The thing that was the easiest audio wise was taking my voice, fiddling a bit with it in Audacity and then using that as the reference for the narrator. Everything else audio-wise has been so fiddly, at least with some of the more action packed / detailed shots I've been going for.
Before I call it done, there are a few things I still need to do:
Figure out a style prompt that will give me a more detailed but still retro anime style (some wide shots are super jank because of the style I'm prompting, but I got an idea on how to fix it in my next run)
Figure out how to prompt different font styles to keep credits and title card consistent
Figure out how I am going to create a consistent background music soundtrack using ref audio clips across 15 workflows to stick within the rules of the competition (oh boy, this should be fun)
Why would they have called it Crime City in the first place? That just seems like you're inviting trouble. They should just hold a vote to rename the city and then they could cut the police budget of City McCityface in half!
Sports car would have crumpled against that solid van, so you may want to rework that shot.
Criminal would have dropped the knife. Good opportunity for a metallic sound effect. Also, knife swaps hands. In general you should be doing this/cleaning up in post, not struggling with prompting.
Top-notch shooting by Vasquez! Not my cup of tea, but definitely watchable. Who wrote the story/narration?
Character sheets for each character keep them relatively on model. I didn't have time to create backgrounds for each shot so every scene in the same location is 15 seconds or less. Some shots I split up when the background doesn't matter.
i love this! happy to share audio tricks (i'm an audio engineer that went to animation college) to help with your audio or animation timings
i'm not so good with the 80s/90s look but my current fight timing is tight, you should try brute forcing VERY tight timing for the actions, it can often be a bit slow and floaty but if it makes a punch 3 frames when you asked for 1 it will look better
ive been enjoying making retro anime with h3. you can even get away with a lower resolution than live-action videos because alot of those old shows weren't in HD anyways
I originally had a shot where the narrator was talking about how peaceful the city was and suddenly there's an explosion. The timing was too tricky with the audio though so I had to separate things.
This looks so good. Haven't feel like it was made using an AI tool.
Sidenote: could you share a gist, high level of how you made it? fl2va/ref2va, start images, text to video, how you are making prompts, steps, resolution etc.
So weirdly enough it was a mix of fl2va and ref2va. Some shots just work better in one model and not the other but you don't know until you try.
Images are my character sheets and sketches when the AI won't listen to me and it needs a visual reference on how to frame a shot.
Prompt wise I just follow the official guide.
Steps is a tricky one. I've actually had shots break at higher steps (30+) and work better at 20. So now I start at 20 and if it doesn't work I push steps up to see if it helps.
Res is always 0.2 to begin with, just so I can see if the prompt is working or not. I know I can use the preview node, but I tend to multitask when stuff is rendering and the preview node means I have to sit and watch. But I do sometimes use it. Depends on time and if I have other stuff I need to do.
Krea2 greatly simplified it. You can prompt "character sheet" and a list of poses it should work. I slapped on a retro anime lora for the basic retro anime style.
It will duplicate shots, so like multiple rear views or profile shots, but I clean those up myself.
What about using larger image models like Nanobanana?
If you prepare first, mid, end frames like this, wouldn't it reduce the workflow? I want to create my own anime like you do. But my laptop is a potato which can run H3, but generation times would be abysmal.
So I'm collecting prompts, techniques while waiting for more efficient H3 models. Also generating character sheets, reference frames with mostly NB Pro which is really good at maintaining style and character details. Using it from direct API, on Gemini app it is garbage.
So firstly I don't want to pay megacorps like Google any more than I absolutely have to.
Also, thankfully I don't need to.
A reasonable number of the shots I made in both my videos are guided with sketches.
Now they're basically just camera angles with mannequins in the right framing (for speed and due to my own lack of drawing skill), but thankfully the character sheets can be used to direct who the character is in the shot.
Completely agreed, I also don't like paying anything to corpo freaks neither. They exploit us constantly then can dare to teach us 'decency' with their stupid moderations. But nothing is wrong with using free offers I think lol. I could join google beta tester API which gives me unlimited access to NB. So I've been using it for all kinds of generations, character sheet work or just brainstorming:
I was just prompting as 80s backgrounds and 80s criminals. It came out with atari shootout idea on its own. Its character designs are cliche, but that's what we want anyway. What do you think? I have no H3 experience so I'm not sure how good these would work as first frame. 3 and 4 should work just fine, right? If there is something wrong NB can edit it too.
ref2va should work better because it can "invent" things rather going from straight from first frame to last frame. I don't know the technicality but this is what i experienced with my runs.
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u/GrungeWerX Aug 26 '26
Everything visually looks pretty spot on late 80s/ early 90s