Runway Act One

Animating Still Images with Videos

Introducing, Act-One. A new way to generate expressive character performances inside Gen-3 Alpha using a single driving video and character image. No motion capture or rigging required.

Learn more about Act-One below.

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— Runway (@runwayml) October 22, 2024

RunwayML Act One is designed to let you make character-focused animation clips with AI. To produce those clips, you need to combine a source video input, which gives the AI the movements and the speech or audio it needs, plus a reference image, which it uses as the baseline for the animation.

So, you can record a video of yourself reading out a script, for example, and then upload that and use an image of an animated old man as your baseline. Act One will then animate the old man image, overlay the audio from your video, and make him move and speak the same way that you (or your subject) did in the input video.

Learn more: How to use Runway's Act One?

Lifelike Movements & Expressions

One of the best aspects of Runway’s Act One is how lifelike and realistic the output is. It has extraordinary levels of understanding facial anatomy and movement, and it uses the movement seen in the input video and copies that over to the final animation. It’s almost like doing motion capture, but without any expensive equipment or time-consuming processes.

A Range of References

When it comes to picking the base or foundation of your animation, Runway gives you a lot of options. It actually offers dozens of different reference images and short video clips in a range of styles, like 3D animated, 2D animated, illustrated, and photorealistic, and these reference characters aren't just limited to human ones.

You can also make animations involving animal faces, robots, and more, so you can effectively create realistic animations that look however you want, from Disney-style princesses to lifelike people. The tool also allows you to upload your own image, should you prefer, opening even more opportunities for creativity and expression.

Motion Intensity Options

Before generating your animation with Act One, you also get to configure the Motion Intensity setting, which ranges from 1 (the least amount of motion) to 5 (the most). This allows you to set exactly how much movement you get in your final video, so you can make them more energetic and dynamic or more relaxed and calm, according to the desired mood.

Motion Intensity value	Output
1
3
5