Abstract

With appealing visual effects, kinetic typography (animated text) has prevailed in movies, advertisements, and social media. However, it remains challenging and time-consuming to craft its animation scheme. We propose an automatic framework to transfer the animation scheme of a rigid body on a given meme GIF to text in vector format. First, the trajectories of key points on the GIF anchor are extracted and mapped to the text’s control points based on local affine transformation. Then the temporal positions of the control points are optimized to maintain the text topology. We also develop an authoring tool that allows intuitive human control in the generation process. A questionnaire study provides evidence that the output results are aesthetically pleasing and well preserve the animation patterns in the original GIF, where participants were impressed by a similar emotional semantics of the original GIF. In addition, we evaluate the utility and effectiveness of our approach through a workshop with general users and designers.

Keywords —— Animation, Motion transfer, Kinetic typography

Preview & Detailed Introduction

Authoring Paradigms

We propose a framework that adapts unsupervised cross-domain motion transfer models to the vector domain. Using affine transformation, we align the motion keypoints to vector control points and apply both local and global optimization to maintain the text topology. Users can interact with the framework in three ways: (1) steering motion alignment by tweaking the intermediate motion key points, (2) adjusting the model hyperparameters, and (3) precise control by editing the output control points by frame. This leads to the following two authoring paradigms for kinetic typography with precise control and automatic generation.

Related Works

• First Order Motion Model for Image Animation. NeurIPS’2019.
• Motion Representations for Articulated Animation. CVPR’2021.
• Dynamic Typography: Bringing Text to Life via Video Diffusion Prior. arXiv’2024.

Citation

Liwenhan Xie, Zhaoyu Zhou, Kerun Yu, Yun Wang, Huamin Qu, Siming Chen. 2023. Wakey-Wakey: Animate Text by Mimicking Characters in a GIF. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’23). Article No. 98. 14 pages. ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: 10.1145/3586183.3606813

@InProceedings {xie2023wakey,
    title = {Wakey-Wakey: Animate Text by Mimicking Characters in a GIF},
    author = {Liwenhan Xie and Zhaoyu Zhou and Kerun Yu and Yun Wang and Huamin Qu and Siming Chen},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
    year = {2023},
    numpages = {14},
    articleno = {98},
    isbn = {9798400701320},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606813},
    doi = {10.1145/3586183.3606813},
    location = {San Francisco, CA, USA},
    series = {UIST '23}
}