# Animate-A-Story: Storytelling with Retrieval-Augmented Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 90 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [MagicVideo: Efficient Video Generation With Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11018/) (2022)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13848/) (2023)
- [Generating Videos with Scene Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02612/) (2016)
- [MAGVIT: Masked Generative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05199/) (2022)
- [VideoFusion: Decomposed Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08320/) (2023)
- [ControlVideo: Training-free Controllable Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13077/) (2023)
- [Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation using Pose-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01186/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 90)

- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [StoryDiffusion: Consistent Self-Attention for Long-Range Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01434/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [FreeNoise: Tuning-Free Longer Video Diffusion via Noise Rescheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15169/) (2023)
- [Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04001/) (2025)
- [VideoDirectorGPT: Consistent Multi-scene Video Generation via LLM-Guided Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15091/) (2023)
- [Long Context Tuning for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10589/) (2025)
- [Seeing and Hearing: Open-domain Visual-Audio Generation with Diffusion Latent Aligners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17723/) (2024)
- [VideoDPO: Omni-Preference Alignment for Video Diffusion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14167/) (2024)
- [Generative Image Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07906/) (2023)
- [MovieDreamer: Hierarchical Generation for Coherent Long Visual Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16655/) (2024)
- [Video as the New Language for Real-World Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17139/) (2024)
- [InstructVideo: Instructing Video Diffusion Models with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12490/) (2023)
- [Vlogger: Make Your Dream A Vlog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09414/) (2024)
- [MagicStick: Controllable Video Editing via Control Handle Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03047/) (2023)
- [CustomCrafter: Customized Video Generation with Preserving Motion and Concept Composition Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13239/) (2024)
- [FreeTraj: Tuning-Free Trajectory Control in Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16863/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Short Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08268/) (2024)
- [Captain Cinema: Towards Short Movie Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18634/) (2025)
- [PhysMotion: Physics-Grounded Dynamics From a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17189/) (2024)
- [PhysAnimator: Physics-Guided Generative Cartoon Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16550/) (2025)
- [Efficient Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey from Principles to Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11795/) (2024)
- [MEVG: Multi-event Video Generation with Text-to-Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04086/) (2023)
- [Mind the Time: Temporally-Controlled Multi-Event Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05263/) (2024)
- [LeviTor: 3D Trajectory Oriented Image-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15214/) (2024)
- [VideoGen-of-Thought: Step-by-step generating multi-shot video with minimal manual intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15138/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.