I Turned my Friends Into LIVING TOYS
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as a concrete example of artists using generative AI to remove VFX tedium and tell their own stories, countering claims that AI video is only slop.
Recommended by 3 people across 2 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What it is
Corridor Crew's Niko tests a new AI pipeline that turns photos of toys and dolls into animatable characters, using human mocap performances and Wan Animate to transfer motion and facial expressions. The crew runs it on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 workstation and uses it to make a short story piece. The video is sponsored by NVIDIA and Puget Systems.
What people said
Recommends tpmoney · 2026-01 · Hacker News · on “The suck is why we're here”
Some people are using it that way sure. And some people are using it to automate things that "should" (or at least that someone would want to) be automated. For example, here's a video from the Corridor Crew channel[1] that uses AI to automate the creation of animatable 3d, near photorealistic characters from pictures of real objects. And then they use that to make an actual piece of art, with an actual story. Yes, they could have taken those images, build 3d models in blender or whatever and hand animated them. They have those skills and their previous work attests to their ability to do it. And they clearly enjoy doing that sometimes too. But that sort of work can also be tedious and time
Recommends echelon · 2026-01 · Hacker News · on “All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)”
The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech. They've made dozens of essays and done tons of experiments showing that they think AI is going to be great for our field: [this video] (scrub through the timelines to the end of these videos to see) [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Listen to them. Our entire industry pays attention to them, and they're right! [1] [LINK]
Recommends echelon · 2026-01 · Hacker News · on ““Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders”
> More of this, less AI The comment was great without this part. I'm sorry I'm going to go on a rant, but seeing this day in and day out really gets to me. I'm a filmmaker. AI is an incredible tool that is making VFX affordable to those of us with budgets. My friends and I are already using it in roto/comp workflows: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] (NSFW, bloody/gory - the effects look bad because we did this for a "film hackathon" and had an extremely short amount of time with no chance to fix the editing, script, lack of locations, etc. Under four hours for the VFX work.) Corridor Crew are making incredible stuff and teaching people how to do it: [this video] [LINK] [LINK] There's so much use by actual ar
Recommends marcianx · 2026-01 · Hacker News · on “AI generated music barred from Bandcamp”
I think it makes some sense to allow leeway for intelligent "signal processing" using AI (separating out individual tracks, clean-up, etc) vs generating new content with AI. Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium of the process. It's not clear where the line is though. I was quite impressed with Corridor Crew's (albeit NVidia+Puget-sponsored) video [1] where they photographed dolls, motion-captured human actors moving like the dolls, and transferred the skeletal animation and facial expres
Recommends echelon · 2026-08 · Hacker News · on “Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs”
That's a Higgsfield submarine ad. You should watch how Corridor Crew uses and evangelizes the tech, as it's far more honest: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [this video] (These are all fascinating.) Or an AI video tech reviewer like Theoretically Tim who covers the space as it evolves: [LINK]
Cites stronglikedan · 2025-12 · Hacker News · on “SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image”
That's cool and all, but it seems like only the first step in this, where they go from 2D photo all the way to fully animated (animatable?) characters: [this video]
Cites echelon · 2026-01 · Hacker News · on “Show HN: DeepDream for Video with Temporal Consistency”
This is a trip down memory lane! I remember when DeepDream first came out, and WaveNet not long after. I was immediately convinced this stuff was going to play a huge role in media production. I'm a big hobbyist filmmaker. I told all of my friends who actually work in film (IATSE, SAG, etc.) and they were so skeptical. I tried to get them to make an experimental film using DeepDream. This was about the same time Intel was dabbling in 360 degree filmmaking and just prior to Epic Games / Disney working on "The Volume". I bought a bunch of Kinects and built a really low-fidelity real time version of what Intel was working on. The sensors are VGA resolution, so it's not at all cinematic. When St
Cites echelon · 2026-01 · Hacker News · on “Show HN: ArtCraft AI crafting engine, written in Rust”
I've been a photons-on-glass filmmaker for over ten years, and I've been developing ArtCraft for myself, my friends, and my colleagues. All of my film school friends have a lot of ambition, but the production pyramid doesn't allow individual talent to shine easily. 10,000 students go to film school, yet only a handful get to helm projects they want with full autonomy - and almost never at the blockbuster budget levels that would afford the creative vision they want. There's a lot of nepotism, too. AI is the personal computer moment for film. The DAW. One of my friends has done rotoscoping with live actors: [LINK] The Corridor folks show off a lot of creativity with this tech: [LINK] [this video]
Cites echelon · 2026-02 · Hacker News · on “Show HN: ArtCraft AI crafting engine, written in Rust”
I've been a photons-on-glass filmmaker for over ten years, and I've been developing ArtCraft for myself, my friends, and my colleagues. All of my film school friends have a lot of ambition, but the production pyramid doesn't allow individual talent to shine easily. 10,000 students go to film school, yet only a handful get to helm projects they want with full autonomy - and almost never at the blockbuster budget levels that would afford the creative vision they want. There's a lot of nepotism, too. AI is the personal computer moment for film. The DAW. One of my friends has done rotoscoping with live actors: [LINK] The Corridor folks show off a lot of creativity with this tech: [LINK] [this video]
Cites echelon · 2026-02 · Hacker News · on “Show HN: I built an AI movie making and design engine in Rust”
I've been a photons-on-glass filmmaker for over ten years, and I've been developing ArtCraft for myself, my friends, and my colleagues. All of my film school friends have a lot of ambition, but the production pyramid doesn't allow individual talent to shine easily. 10,000 students go to film school, yet only a handful get to helm projects they want with full autonomy - and almost never at the blockbuster budget levels that would afford the creative vision they want. There's a lot of nepotism, too. AI is the personal computer moment for film. The DAW. One of my friends has done rotoscoping with live actors: [LINK] The Corridor folks show off a lot of creativity with this tech: [LINK] [this video]