Wakey-Wakey: Animate Text by Mimicking Characters in a GIF

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated framework that transfers the animation style from GIFs to text, simplifying the creation of animated typography with preserved visual patterns and user-friendly controls.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for automatically animating text by mimicking GIF character movements, including an authoring tool for human adjustments.

Findings

Participants found the animations aesthetically pleasing.

The approach effectively preserves original GIF animation patterns.

User studies confirmed the utility and effectiveness of the method.

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.