Feb – Apr 2025
Video stops being write-only
Swap, add, keyframe and perform become verbs.
Video stopped being something you could only generate from scratch. New tools let you swap a person in an existing clip, add an object, transition between two frames, or move a real actor's performance onto a generated character.
Tutorials2
Runway and Midjourney references: tips and showdown
Theoretically Media · YouTube · May 2025
How it worked
- Pika 2.2: insert a subject into existing footage (Pikadditions), replace one (Pikaswaps), or keyframe a transition up to ten seconds (Pikaframes).
- Talking characters from a single photo plus audio: OmniHuman-1, Hedra Character-3.
- Camera as a menu: Higgsfield's fifty-plus motion presets.
- Runway Gen-4 References: up to three reference images (photos, generated images, 3D models or selfies) for consistent characters and locations, then image-to-video.
- The showrunner pipeline: webcam performance → Act-One → Hedra lip-sync → ElevenLabs voices → Premiere, about twelve hours per episode.
Example Films1
More making-ofs1
How films were actually made, from the people who made them.
Related on the timeline1