Animate-A-Story: Storytelling with Retrieval-Augmented Video Generation
Authors: name: Yingqing He, name: Menghan Xia, name: Haoxin Chen, name: Xiaodong Cun, name: Yuan Gong, name: Jinbo Xing, name: Yong Zhang, name: Xintao Wang, name: Chao Weng, name: Ying Shan, name: Qifeng Chen

Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex
process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics
animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the
abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video
by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework
comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which
provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by
query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates
plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts.
For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and
extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a
controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over
structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the
structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency
across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which
allows the specification of the desired character identities through text
prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits
significant advantages over various existing baselines.