Weeks after Stable Diffusion goes public in August 2022, Deforum launches as a Colab notebook that turns text prompts into animated video. Building on the lineage of Disco Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP, and PyTTI, Deforum adds Stable Diffusion's dramatically improved image quality to the animation workflow. The signature technique is 'prompt travel': schedule different prompts at different timestamps and watch the AI morph between them, creating dreamlike sequences where one world melts into another. Camera controls let creators zoom, pan, rotate, and fly through AI-generated landscapes. Quickly evolves into an Automatic1111 WebUI extension, making it accessible to anyone who can run Stable Diffusion locally. Deforum animations are projected at concerts worldwide, synced to music. The tool becomes the creative backbone of a generation of AI artists who will later move into AI filmmaking. Many of the aesthetic signatures of early AI video, the morphing transitions, the surreal prompt travels, the infinite zooms, originate here.