Generate AI Art Videos for Fun, NFTs + Animated Cover Art | Douglas Butner | Skillshare
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Generate AI Art Videos for Fun, NFTs + Animated Cover Art

teacher avatar Douglas Butner, Teacher of Nomadism, Art, Music, Code

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome

      0:38

    • 2.

      Class Project

      0:48

    • 3.

      Opening Artbreeder

      2:33

    • 4.

      Exploring All Categories

      3:31

    • 5.

      Generative Video Tool Overview

      0:44

    • 6.

      Genealogy of Images

      3:45

    • 7.

      Looping + Rendering

      4:17

    • 8.

      High-Quality Gifs with gifski

      9:58

    • 9.

      Thank You

      0:59

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About This Class

Ever see some crazy, trippy art and wonder how it was made? 

Chances are, you've been looking at AI images and videos without knowing it.

Maybe you’ve played around with text-to-image generation, but you probably haven’t played with video. While the progress on images has been insane, video still seems elusive, even for AI. In this class, you will make your own AI art video with Artbreeder, a free-to-start option with quality images coming from a full breeding system using database of images that users create. Breeding images makes for incredible video, all released under the cc0 license.

You’ll feel like Picasso using this tool. And the best part is, you put your energy into it with your selection, and can blend still images you upload into your video, making AI a tool for you, not the other way around. 

Here’s what you’ll learn

  • Use Artbreeder to generate AI art videos
  • Explore the world of image genealogy to perfect AI videos
  • Divine the art of small, beautiful .gifs from any video with gifski

Let’s get started!

Jump into the class, or keep reading for some FAQs

See you soon

- Douglas

________________

FAQs

Why can we only use one category at a time?

AI works best with a specific algorithm targeting a specific type of images. The calculations on a face are much different than on a building. AI programs separate by type for performance and accuracy.

What else does Artbreeder offer?

You can “breed” still images using other images on the site, and upload your own images. Use both in your video.

Why do AI generation services usually cost money? 

AI programs and their organizers such as DALL-E and Artbreeder need to pay for the vast amount of computing resources it takes to run this software. In addition to processing speed, the ram required to hold all the information needed for the calculations makes AI image generation difficult on most personal computers. We can see that the image we get back. 

Is this course just on Artbreeder?

About 1/3 is about optimizing a .gif using gifski. Learn to make .gif loops out of any video, and manipulate FPS, speed, resolution, and quality to get a manageable file size. 

Requirement: Mac is needed to use gifski (lesson 8)

How can I make my final product look better?

Spend some time at the beginning of any project just hoarding the best images in a particular category, those with aesthetic appeal and a deep genealogy. You will have an easy time filling in the blanks and testing variations when you go to create your videos, and end up with a better product

P.S. Although there is a feature to allow you to copy and paste, I have only had success with “hearts” that make the image show up in the starred section. 

Thank you for being here! If you liked this crash course, be sure to check out my other courses here on Skillshare, including my masterclass on selling your art online. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Douglas Butner

Teacher of Nomadism, Art, Music, Code

Teacher

I love to learn and teach. I am a free-spirited creator, and have been traveling the world as a digital nomad for over three years. My courses focus on selling art online, energy work, and music. I teach what would help a younger me, including the strategies I used to sell over 20,000 copies of my artwork without paid advertising, energy techniques I have learned to unlock human potential, and tips to help musicians.

 

My Life

I grew up in Maryland, and I am currently slow traveling the world thanks to selling art and teaching online. I plan to keep traveling, creating, and learning from this amazing planet as long as I live!

My purpose on Earth is love. Love is the greatest teacher, healer, and creator. I believe when the individual chooses to... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Welcome: Hello and welcome to this crash course on generating videos using artificial intelligence to sell as LFTs or for cover art for your music and FTEs. I'm going to show you an incredible tool that we're going to use to tap into the genealogy of images generated by artificial intelligence to weave them together into an incredible NFT that you can use and sell in your art without any type of legal restrictions. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: For your class project, you are going to be generating your own NFT video art, which you are legally free to sell or to use as cover art for a music NFT and also commercialized in any other way. You can use this art as a standalone sale for open see atomic hub or any other platform. Or you can use it as cover art for a music NFT. Once you've got your art by following along and the steps in this course. Don't forget to share it in the project section of this class. When you go through and actually create your NFT, don't forget to share the link to it as well. Back in the project section, I'm looking forward to see what you see through the eye of AI. 3. Opening Artbreeder: I want to show you my favorite tool can generate artificial intelligent videos, which look artsy. I mean, we're not just generating texts into images here. We're taking images and we're blending them together using artificial intelligence to make something loophole that we can use as a NFT or as a cover art for a music NFT. So first of all, we're going to go to art breeder.com and we're going to login or sign up for a new account. And you can sign up with Google if you have a Google account and go ahead and sign in and it'll create your account for you. Now it's good to understand that this is a freemium service. So we're gonna be able to generate about three or four different cover art videos using a free account. And if you want to continue beyond that, I encourage you to pay for credits from art breeder. If you click up here, you'll see your profile, but we don't have any images created yet. So let's go back to art reader.com and we're going to click this plus button to get started making our video. Now, key point here, click video. And we have these ten different sections. Before we get started generating our artificial intelligent art, we need to realize that we really are stepping into a Pandora's box of art. So it's good to get a little bit organized and figure out what type of art that we want to create. So I'm looking for an FTR for my song blue birds. So some of the words I'm looking for are birds, castle, symmetry, space, and Aliens, which are a few of the things that we talk about except for maybe not castle. So these words are going to get us organized so that later on our search is much easier and more fruitful when we're brainstorming what words we want to use to make our cover art. We also need to know what's available. So if we go to video, we'll see that we have these ten separate categories and these are pretty separate. So you're going to be generating art that's either side, bio art or album landscape buildings. But it's a lot more difficult to do something that is a cross between say, a landscape and then animate portrait. And I believe this has something to do with the processing power of the artificial intelligence, but I'm not exactly sure. 4. Exploring All Categories: When you're creating your album cover art video, you're going to have to use one of these ten different categories. So as we're brainstorming what words we want to put in or what images we want to put into the AI. We also want to think about these ten categories. What's available in each category, and which one we want to choose, as well as what we want to search to pick out our images. So let's go ahead and go through each of these categories and take a look at some of the art that's available for us to use. We can see this owl over here looking pretty cool. This is a lot of animals in this section. A lot of kinda trippy animals. Then let's keep going to the next section. I believe this is the science, the sci-fi section. This is actually what I use for all of my cover art. But there's a lot of eyes, a lot of planets, things like that. Next we have sort of more realistic faces. Now, I do want to say like all of this stuff is CC 0. This stuff is in the public domain and may be used for commercial purposes. So don't worry about using these faces. It should be completely legally fine and keep it in mind. These aren't actually real faces. These are either generated by AI or changed by AI in some way. So now we have some more animated type characters. And there's a con to go through. I'm not going to scroll through every single one. But if you go to like random, this is landscapes. You can scroll through these yourself and start to save four or five of these images to put together. And they do have to be in the same category. So I believe this is the album art category actually. So they have like a whole category for album art. I've actually never used it to make album art, but you're more than welcome to experiment and find some cool stuff here. As well as, you know, you don't have to make video. This course is about making video art, but you're perfectly legally allowed to come in here and make a still image and use that as your album art. Now we have some more animate for any type characters. These are the buildings. Some really crazy stuff pops out of here. And here we have some more art. I forget which category this is. Let's see. This is probably, maybe paintings. So yeah, this is the paintings category. Lots of cool stuff could definitely makes them like super Picasso wish art with this, with this category. Next we have, I believe, the final animated characters section. So lots to explore there as well. The next thing you can do to fully explore these categories is to start searching. So as you're compiling this list of words that you want to use, you do want to make sure that there's something there. So maybe you had this idea that you want to a green theme. So you can search green and see what shows up or you want to get more specific. You want a bush or a tree. So yeah, like if you see something you like, you can go ahead and add it down there or you can just start to save these type of things. 5. Generative Video Tool Overview: Now that we're familiar a little bit with the art that we have available. Let's pick this section that we chose. This time. I'm just going to do general and we'll get started making our video. This is the main video creation page, will have a preview up here which will be like just image blending preview, that is not AI. Then you have the actual art down here, which we're going to add in just a second. And a stack counter over here, which tells you how many frames per second, how many images and things like that. But we're actually going to keep that at 24. And let's get started adding our first art. 6. Genealogy of Images: Okay guys, I almost forgot this is super, super important. Now, the way that the AI works is it has this sort of geneology for each of the images. And if you want to have really, really great cover art, that's like every frame is just like its own movie. You're going to want to look at the lineage of each and every image that you're adding. So I just checked out this image of a bird and I clicked on it using this button right here. And then I can see the images that led up to this image should this is like the family tree that the AI use to generate this image. But it's not very deep. And we can find that out by looking at different images and seeing what their lineages. So this has a ton of images leading into it. So it's actually going to work better in our final product, but I actually don't like that image. So I'm going to find one that I do like that does have a decent lineage. So this is a perfect, perfect example. It's got a lot of birds moved into one, but it's still actually looks like a bird. So I'm going to hold onto this. Okay, so if we want to get this image over, we've got to give it a heart. Then close out and open back up, and then go to your start and you will find it there. So that is the only way that I've figured out to get this into the image that we want. But we'll see that now we've got an image that's similar to this one, but it has a lot more lineage. So we're going to go through and do the same process. We're going to search for images and then check their lineage. If their lineage is in deep enough, we're going to look for another image that has a deeper lineage. So here we have, it's not the deepest limit lineage in this image. So I'm going to actually look for a different one. This looks like it might be it looks about actually about the same. So let's. 7. Looping + Rendering: Okay, so we have three images. Now I'm going to teach you a little trick that you can use optionally and that is to add the first and the last image as the same image. So I've already started this one so I can easily find it. And it can be difficult if you did not store it. So now we have the front and the back as the same image. Now, there's another way to do this, to make a loop that is without using the same front and back, but that involves playing forward and then going backwards to end at the same image. So you do have two options there. Again, the first one is to put the first and the last image is the same. And the second option is to use just three images without a repeat. And then we're going to use another software to loop it. But that loop will be going to the end and then coming back to the beginning. So next we got to pick how we want these to move through. Now, I'm a big fan of keeping it simple with an ease in, out quadratic, but you can test out some different things as well as you can try to just keep it linear. So we've got this setting of the time as well as the, this transition here, which you can see. And if you're familiar with like web development, it's the same as the CSS animations and probably in all kinds of video editing too. So I'm going to go ahead and click Apply. All. The final thing we're gonna wanna do. If we do this technique is we're going to have to change the first and the last one to 1 second and leave all the middle ones as two seconds. And this is just going to make sure that it's even as far as the timing between each frame because we do have these frames twice. Now, the final thing to keep in mind using this free account is that you're limited by the amount of frames that you create. That is, it's not about how many videos you create on a free account before they make you pay. It's about how many frames you create, because this is the processing power of the artificial intelligence. So if you wanna get more bang for your buck, you got to think about this. Do I want to make a shorter video? Do I wanna make a longer video? And how many frames per seconds do I want to have? Because that's how you're being charged. So I've got a 4 second video now, that's 96 frames, and I believe you get somewhere like a thousand frames. So let's go ahead and generate. And this is gonna be our first AI cover art. And it's gonna go right to our email. So yeah, we just hit Generate bam. Now we get this video is processing. You will receive an email link when it is ready. This is exciting. Okay, So it's been just like one minute and our video is already ready. Now, when we click this link, it's going to take us to a Adobe Image thing. And we can see we have, our loop is right here. So man, like it looks super cool and we're gonna go ahead and download it. Okay, so we're saving this image. And now we have a MP4. Now, in a lot of cases, this MP4 will be all that you need. And I got to say, I am very pleased with how this turned out. I'm going to have to really look at it a few more times to really get the meaning. But I will say that the resolution is good for an NFT. It actually looks a little bit small because I've used this tool a lot. And sometimes it spits out a 1024 by 1024 images. But I think that has something to do with the smallest image that's used in the generation. So this time we did get a smaller image out of the AI. But this is, it's great, It's what we need. So in the next video, we'll go over how to turn this into a JIF. And really it's easy to turn it into a JIF. What's hard is getting the quality correct, getting the file size correct, and making sure that the resolution will work all the places that you're going to play it. See you soon. 8. High-Quality Gifs with gifski: Okay, So we've made our NFT cover art. Now it's time to convert it into a GIF. Now if you're on a Mac, I highly recommend something called just ski. Now, just ski is an amazing software. It's free, it's open source, I believe. And it will allow you to take any video and save it as a GIF at super high quality and low file size. Now when we open this up and just ski, we get a few parameters. Number one is the dimensions. And this is something important to think about. A lot of LFTs are either 500 by five hundred, eight hundred by 800, thousand by a thousand were the sort of variations of that, like 512 by 512. Actually, I'm perfectly happy with this original resolution of five by 512. The key will be get it down into a format that fits. So first of all, you see that this balance is checked. Now what bounce will do is it'll, it'll loop it. If it's not like lupus, it will loop it if it's not having the same frame at the beginning and at the end. But you'll remember that when we were making this art, we did choose to do that. But as I said, it's just an option. I could have removed this and then made these all the same transition. And then, then I would have to use this balance. But since I didn't, I don't need the balance. Now, this is a key thing to think about when we're balancing all of these things. These things have file size, resolution, frames per second, and just the quality like what render quality It's going to be. If we unclick balance, the length of the file goes down by half. So we were having to save a 4 second file with twice as much data, which makes our job much harder, but without the balance. By doing this technique I showed you, you have half the file size and then you can bump up the quality a little bit more. Another thing to do if you are running into this file size constraint is to speed up the JIF. So if you speed it up five x, now it's, it's less than a 1.5 or less than 1 second. It does shrink the file size down. You can also lower the dimensions, although in my view, I think that if it gets lower than 500 by 500, it's going to start being not quite big enough for all the places you'd like to show it off. And you can also play with the FPS. Now, I do recommend that you try to keep the FPS at 24 or at whatever FPS that you use to generate this image. And that's just going to help it synchronized and make sure that you're getting the true image in the final JIF. So if you find out that your art style, like maybe you're using five images here at 24 FPS and you find out that, Hey, I'm having trouble getting this down into a five megabyte file size. Maybe it's time to go to 20 frames per second at the first step. So rendering 20 frames per second, then putting it in here and going 20 frames per second. And finally, the last thing you can do to reduce file size is to bump down the quality. Now, I'm not a big fan of this. Also. I don't think it can really lower the file size as much as some other things. So I do try to keep the quality a little bit higher. But it's all about experimentation guys like you gotta just keep trying things and trying things until you get the right file size at the right quality. So we've done a lot of talking. Now, let's actually look at what we're going to end up with. So we haven't estimated size of 11.6 megabytes. Now that's too big. Mint songs requires a five megabyte file size. So I know that it's not going to work, but I just want to look at the quality. So let's go ahead and hit Convert. Alright, so now we have our image. I'm going to go ahead and save it into our music NFT cover our file. We'll say bird gang, high rises. And then we're just gonna do one. So we know it's the first one that we tried. Before we even look at that. Let's go back and I'm going to do the same thing, but with a much lower quality. And we're going to save that. And we saw that was eight megabytes. So it's still too big for us to use. So we gotta get down to five megabytes like or, or nothing can happen. So if we wanted to reduce the file size by half, we could reduce the frames per second by half, right? So I'm actually going to bump the quality backup. And we're going to do the frames per second at 12. Now this may or may not. I might have to go a little bit lower on the quality. This may or may not. Let us go below the five megabyte file limit. It's actually saying a little bit higher. But that estimation isn't always accurate. So I'm gonna go ahead and try to render this out and see what we have. We actually did end up with too big of an image, but that's okay. This is going to be low FPS and then three, and we're going to take a look at these in just a minute to see the differences. But we really do need to get something below five megabytes. So I'm going to shave off a few pixels. I'm going to bump up the FPS and try to lower the quality just a little bit. And again, it's getting tough to make this particular piece Into the size that we need. But this is the game that we play with all of these arts is to try to make a good quality file size for our final product. Now I do want to say that it's actually not required that any of this happens. If we go ahead and open up our video itself, will see that this video is only 1.8 megabytes, and this is actually a completely finished video loop, so we already have the final product. The problem is that a lot of these services may not accept a video as a cover art file. Currently mint songs does not allow you to do that. So let's take a look at these other ones that we have. And this is 6.2 megabytes, so it's still too big. And with the low FPS, you can tell that it looks not near as good as it did with the video. Let's go up and see what else we have. So this was the lower quality, but still the high frames per second. So this has the same 24 frames per second that our video has. Its just more pixelated and it still doesn't look good. So let's go up to this 10.7 and you can see that this is actually possible. You know, it's, it's seems like a little bit slow in that one place. I don't know why. You can barely see the pixelation of the colors compared to the MP4 video and the MP4. You can see there's the least amount of compression, right? So, okay, so now we've got an open over here and you can see a little bit better of the loop in this MP4 video. So if we can use that, then we don't need to play around at all. But guess what? We still did not make a video file that fits our constraints of five megabytes. We're going to have to play around a little bit more. And unfortunately, I think that that means lowering the size even more. I do. I really need the quality to be better like, and I'm going to drop it down to 320. I do want the FPS to be 24, so I'm going to raise it up and I'm going to keep the quality here. And it says five megabytes will see what it actually is, but this might be the winner for what we need. Okay, and we did it. We have a 4.6 megabyte file. We had to sacrifice some of the resolution, but we got to keep the frames per second and we got to keep the image quality. And that's the decision that we made. So we're going to save this as low as four. And now we can, we can really compare what we've came up with. So let's take a look at just the final image. So this is our final image. And I am happy with that. The only thing is like it's too small, but you gotta make a decision. And in this case, because it wasn't compressing there, I made the decision that it had to be small and maybe I'll regret that. Maybe it's not big enough, but you got to make a decision. So this is the original image. This is what we want to use in all cases that we can, if you're making wax and if T's, you'll have no problem using the MP4 with the atomic assets. But as far as Layer twos like polygon, a theorem, you're going to have to check, although mp4 as well as web and video formats are widely supported, It's just like the same IPFS hash that you would use in most cases. 9. Thank You: Alright guys, we did it. We use artificial intelligence to generate an NFT video that we can sell as a standalone NFT or we can use as a cover art for our mint songs, music NFT to make us really stand out in the market. I invite you to check out God's soul on mint songs to see what sort of music and AFT's, I'm cooking up Cxy dot world for the music. And if Tdap I've created, you're also welcome to use our music NFT standard. And of course, checkout meant songs.com, which is not my project, but I really like their platform. And check the video description for my addresses. If you'd like to send me a copy of your music NFT and don't forget about the project. So when you create your music and f t, go ahead and share it so that the rest of the class can enjoy. Thank you so much for taking this course piece.