I typically try to avoid AI as I want to focus on human-made creativity in my digital projects. But animating takes time and I’m not very good at it, so I found a free AI animation tool to take the hard work away and produce some great results for me in both video and GIF form.
Magic Hour Offers Many Creative AI Features
Magic Hour is a browser-based AI tool. It has many creative features for both video and image results. It boasts a handful of free features among its many paid AI generators.
With over 8 generative AI video tools, Magic Hour offers a fun and engaging experience for video and animation creation. It also features at least 12 image generation tools to add to the fun. The image tools consist of features such as a clothes changer, face swap, and AI selfie generator.
Its AI Animation Generator and AI GIF Generator are only two of many free tools to add to your creative workflow. Although not all tools are free, there are at least five free video tools, including a subtitles generator which you might have to pay premium prices for with Premiere Pro’s AI caption and subtitles tools or as one of CapCut’s AI video tools.
For quick GIF creation, using Magic Hour’s AI GIF Generator could be what you need.
Found under the AI image tools, the free GIF generator is a one-stop-shop tool for GIF creation. All it takes is a text prompt and 50 credits to generate an animated result.
The prompt allows for up to 500 characters, so you can be pretty descriptive about what you’d like, including describing the art style you’d like the GIF in. It only produces one result per 50-credit prompt, so try to engineer your prompt well before generating.
The GIF generator is a cool tool for quick generation. If you want something more custom or personalized, then Magic Hour offers a free animation generator.
Using Magic Hour’s free AI Animation Generator lets you create a captivating short video animation quickly.
Magic Hour’s animation generator is a stop-motion animation tool, so your animations might not be as smooth as a Pixar movie release, but they’ll have some quirk to them.
Add Music to Your Animation
The optional first step to generating your Magic Hour animation: Adding music. If you’d prefer a silent movie animation, you can skip to the next step.
You can add audio in a number of ways. If you already have the audio file on your computer system, you can simply drag and drop it into the uploader.
You can also upload audio via a YouTube URL. Maybe there’s a trending song or a loop you’ve heard when doomscrolling videos on YouTube Shorts—now’s the time to add that sound to your animation.
Magic Hour also offers three audio samples to use instead.
Uploading your own audio will give you more personalization to your final animated result. Magic Hour asks for attribution to its sample audio snippets if you publish your result.
Start With an Image
Uploading a starting image is also optional. This will be the frame your animation begins with before it morphs into whatever your prompt is.
I uploaded a photo of my friend’s dog with her tongue hanging out.
Note: If I generated another animation, I’d probably go ahead without a starting image, and just focus on the prompt alone, based on my result.
Write Your Video Prompt
Write your prompt to reflect all that you want in your animation. Feel free to add in some jazzy details to ensure a custom animation, but don’t overcomplicate it.
You don’t need to include the visual style in this prompt, as that comes in the next step. Focus only on the subject matter and visual scenery. My prompt said: “cute kitty hunting a small brown mouse in a corn field.”
Choose Animation Style
You might have an exact animation style in mind when thinking about generating your short animation clip. Whether you want a hand-drawn effect, 3D, claymation, or replicating a specific artist type, there are plenty of options.
Magic Hour’s AI can use the lyrics of your audio to choose an animation style for you. This is only relevant if your audio has lyrics to begin with. And secondly, it might not be relevant if your audio has no basis in what the visuals are. For example, the audio I chose was one of the Magic Hour samples. It featured lyrics about Chuck Taylor shoes and fashion, but my prompt is about a kitty and a mouse. Letting AI takeover might result in something a little too weird.
There’s also a large library of over 40 curated art styles to choose from. Each has a small thumbnail for you to visualize the style before selecting it. Some examples are dark graphic illustration, pixel art, Van Gogh, and old school comic.
Choosing from the curated styles list will give you better control compared to the other two options.
If the other options don’t suit, you can also write a text prompt to describe your intended style. While this is more customized than the previous options, it has a greater potential for misinterpretation or unintended consequences.
I chose the Pixar style from the curated list.
Pick a Camera Effect
Magic Hour’s animation generator is no simple feature—you can even set a complex or simple camera effect for the most impressive results. The visual effects can be synced quickly to your audio, saving spending hours syncing visual elements to audio in After Effects.
You can use an AI-directed approach which identifies your other selections and chooses an effect based on that or you can choose from a library of effects.
There are over 50 camera effects you can use in your short animation. There are small thumbnails of each effect such as rubber band, bounce in and out, or roll in.
I chose Pulse – Audio Sync as my camera effect.
Render Your Video Animation
The final hurdle to seeing your animated masterpiece is to name the project, choose what size and resolution you want it to be (free users are capped at 512px resolution), and to pick the animation’s transition speed.
Transition speed gives a numbered value that shows how quickly the video’s content changes between frames. A lower transition speed will give you a more stable visual result, but a higher transition speed will offer more rapid transitions. I just chose the default option of 4.
Depending on what you uploaded, it may take some time for the results to be generated.
Although it’s cool to generate such a complex animation, based on imagery, audio, visual effects, and more, I’m disappointed in the results. I should have used a high transition speed when rendering the video, which may have helped, but overall, the animated result jumps around too much to be considered a smooth animation with any semblance of a storyline.
With better prompt engineering and a more streamlined goal, I’d bet the result would be more favorable, though. Maybe next time I’ll just use some of the Adobe animation tools and cut my losses.
How Much Does Magic Hour Cost?
Magic Hour’s collective toolbox offers a range of both free and premium features. The good news is that its AI Animation Generator and GIF Generation features are two of its free tools, so you can easily generate fun and interesting animations without paying.
Magic Hour offers premium plans, or you can use it with a free plan. Its premium plans are:
- Creator – $12 per month or $183 per year
- Pro – $55 per month or 660 per year
- Business – $281 per month or $3,366 per year
If you opt for a paid plan and choose to be billed annually, you’ll receive two months free. You can opt for a monthly subscription if the flexibility benefits you better, though.
Magic Hour’s free forever plan provides you with 400 credits to use on a variety of generative AI tools. Each tool or feature uses a varying number of credits, so you’ll need to keep an eye on your usage if you don’t want to use your credits too quickly.
The free plan is also limited by the amount of video you can create, with it being capped at only 17 seconds of video result. This is also limited to a small 512px resolution and will have a Magic Hour watermark.
With so many AI tools available, it can be difficult to know which ones produce good quality, whether free or paid. If I’d have paid for Magic Hour and got the same results, I’d have been very disappointed. As a free tool, it’s fun to experiment and gave me results that made me laugh with the absurdity, but as an animation tool or GIF creator, I wouldn’t use it as a serious tool.
