# Wakey-Wakey: Animate Text by Mimicking Characters in a GIF

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [WaitGPT: Monitoring and Steering Conversational LLM Agent in Data Analysis with On-the-Fly Code Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01703/) (2024)
- [From Data to Story: Towards Automatic Animated Data Video Creation with LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03876/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Typography: Bringing Text to Life via Video Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11614/) (2024)
- [Kinetic Typography Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10476/) (2024)
- [Intelligent Artistic Typography: A Comprehensive Review of Artistic Text Design and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14774/) (2024)
- [OmniLottie: Generating Vector Animations via Parameterized Lottie Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02138/) (2026)
- [MG-Gen: Single Image to Motion Graphics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02361/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With appealing visual effects, kinetic typography (animated text) has prevailed in movies, advertisements, and social media. However, it remains challenging and time-consuming to craft its animation scheme. We propose an automatic framework to transfer the animation scheme of a rigid body on a given meme GIF to text in vector format. First, the trajectories of key points on the GIF anchor are extracted and mapped to the text's control points based on local affine transformation. Then the temporal positions of the control points are optimized to maintain the text topology. We also develop an authoring tool that allows intuitive human control in the generation process. A questionnaire study provides evidence that the output results are aesthetically pleasing and well preserve the animation patterns in the original GIF, where participants were impressed by a similar emotional semantics of the original GIF. In addition, we evaluate the utility and effectiveness of our approach through a workshop with general users and designers.