Drawn to Walk

 

One Drawing, One Playblast

When Kling O1 came out on December 1, 2025, I tried it right away. One day later I rendered this clip, and for the first time an AI video model did exactly what I had been trying to get out of these tools for months.

The setup was simple. I took two things from my own archive: an elephant I had drawn, and an older 3D elephant model of mine with a walk cycle I had animated. I exported the walk as a playblast and gave both to Kling O1 with one clear instruction: use image 1 as the style reference and the video as the motion reference.

What came out is the clip above. My drawn elephant walks with the timing and weight of the original animation. For this video, I cut the original playblast and the result together with a wipe, with the drawing in the corner. That way you can see that the model follows the movement precisely, step by step.

Months of Mush

That sounds obvious today, but it wasn't back then. I had run many experiments like this before, and none of them really worked. The results were always a strange mush, full of odd perspectives that existed neither in the drawing nor in the animation. The models simply never understood what the two inputs were supposed to do together.

Kling O1 was the first video model that could make sense of it and turn it into what I had in mind. For me, that was a milestone.

Early Days

As far as I could see on X and Instagram at the time, hardly anyone was using video models this way yet, feeding in their own animation as motion and their own artwork as style. Since then, the approach has become part of how I work. In later experiments like The Fighter, Maya still provides the choreography while the AI takes care of the look.

https://chris-garcia.art/

The Fighter

From Satirical Puppets to an AI Stop-Motion Experiment

After stumbling across Spitting Image and Hurra Deutschland again, I felt inspired to experiment with their aesthetic in an AI-generated clip. What drew me in were the grotesque faces and ugly, artificial skin of the puppets—that strange combination of caricature, plastic masks, and uncanny life.

My character draws on that same exaggerated mask aesthetic, while the overall look of the clip moves toward stop-motion puppetry. I wanted the figure to feel like a physical object brought to life, retaining its awkwardness and artificial texture.

I first created the movement in Maya using a basic rig and exported it as a playblast. I then supplied that playblast to Seedance 2.0 alongside reference images of my character, aiming to transfer the animation’s movements and timing to the final figure while generating the desired puppet look.

The result connects the visual inspiration of those satirical shows with an experimental workflow: Maya provides the choreography, while Seedance translates it into an imagined stop-motion world.

 https://chris-garcia.art

she is my bestie

 Point particle simulation Seedance2.5

https://chris-garcia.art/ 

Bear Run

 Maya PlayBlast- Seedance2.5

https://chris-garcia.art/ 

Panda Punch

 Maya Playblast, Seedance2.5

https://chris-garcia.art/ 

Pole Dance

 Pole Dance Filmed Reference, post in After Effects

Chasing a Ghost from the 80s

18. Okt. 2026 · @christoph nacken garcia

Where it started

It started with a GIF. One of those little loops that drifts past you online and somehow stays in your head for days.

It showed a light effect straight out of very early computer graphics. The kind of thing you'd have seen on a TV screen in the 80s, when everything glowed and nothing looked quite real. I still can't properly describe it. Glowing lines, shifting colors, light that seemed to live inside the image rather than on top of it.

I didn't know what it was called or how it was made. I just knew I wanted to try building something like it myself.

The raw material

For the base I went back to a piece of stock footage I had bought a while ago: a pole dancer, which I slowed down for this piece.

It turned out to be the perfect subject. A single figure, clear silhouette, slow and flowing movement. Exactly the kind of shape that light effects love, because the eye can follow the body even when the image itself is breaking apart into stripes and color.

Building it in After Effects

I found a tutorial and used it as a starting point, then went my own way pretty quickly.

The core idea was to treat the dancer not as one image but as several. I made different color versions of the same clip: a golden one, a green one and a red one. Then I stacked them on top of each other and shifted them slightly against each other, so the colors split apart at the edges like a badly aligned old monitor.

The effect chain looked roughly like this:

1. Color Range to pull the dancer out of the footage, keyed in Lab color space with a soft edge.
2. Posterize Time at 12 fps, which gives the movement that slightly stuttering, low-tech feel.
3. Tritone to push the colors, in my case pink highlights, golden midtones and lavender shadows.
4. Levels to clean up the contrast.
5. Displacement Map, driven by luminance, which bends a pattern of vertical lines along the shape of the body.
6. Glow, quite strong, with a large radius, so the lines start to burn like light on a tube screen.

On top of everything sits a TV effect, to give the whole thing that video look. Then I rendered it out.

Not what I aimed for, and that's fine

To be honest: I didn't get there. The result doesn't look like the GIF that inspired it. Whatever was going on in that loop, I haven't cracked it yet.

But somewhere along the way the experiment turned into its own thing. It still has that aesthetic: the glowing stripes, the color split, the stutter of the low frame rate, the feeling of watching something on an old screen. It says what I wanted it to say, just with a different accent.

Sometimes a failed copy ends up more interesting than a perfect one would have been.

https://chris-garcia.art/

 

Look Mom no Hands

 Maya playblast of a pretty terrible animation 😉Seedance 2.0.

The Monkey Who Surfed the Highway

18. Okt. 2026 · @christoph nacken garcia

A scene that wouldn't leave me alone

There's one image I've carried around in my head for a long time.

A monkey stands on a highway bridge. We see him from behind. A truck comes thundering along underneath, and the monkey jumps. He lands on the roof of the truck, plants his feet like it's a surfboard, and rides it down the highway, pretending to surf.

That's it. A simple, slightly absurd idea. I just wanted to see it.

My personal stress test

Seeing it turned out to be the hard part.

I built a reference myself: a 3D monkey model, animated very roughly, jumping from the bridge onto the truck. Nothing pretty, just the camera, the angle and the movement I had in mind. The idea was to hand that clip to an AI video tool as a guide and let it turn my rough blocking into a real shot.

I tried it with Kling. With Runway. With Vidu. Basically with every tool that let me attach a video clip. And I tried it more times than I can count.

It never worked. Worse than that, some of the most horrible things I've ever generated came out of this one scene. The tools just didn't get it. They didn't understand that the camera stays behind the monkey as he jumps. Suddenly the camera would swing around, or the monkey would face us, or he'd be filmed from some completely different side. Whatever came out, it never looked like what I wanted, and never like my reference.

At some point this scene became my stress test. Whenever a new tool came along, the monkey had to jump.

Then came Seedance

When I first got my hands on Seedance 2, of course the monkey went in again. Same famous, badly animated reference clip.

This time I added one more thing: a reference image that looked like the first frame of my clip. The video showed the model how everything should move. The image showed it what everything should look like at the start.

And it worked. Surprisingly well. I still had to generate a few times, but after a handful of tries I had some really good takes. The camera stayed behind him. He jumped from the bridge. He landed on the truck. Exactly like the reference, finally.

Surf's up

With the jump in the bag, the rest felt almost easy. I generated the second shot with Seedance as well: the monkey on top of the truck, riding it down the highway like a wave. The surf shot I had pictured all along.

I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's a silly little scene, but it's the one that beat every tool before it, and now it finally exists.

Funny detail: on TikTok it has fewer views than most of my clips, but it's among the ones with the most likes. Not many people saw it. The ones who did seem to love it.

I'll take that.

 https://chris-garcia.art/