# Every Painting Awakened: A Training-free Framework for Painting-to-Animation Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23736 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23736/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [GODIVA: Generating Open-DomaIn Videos from nAtural Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14806/) (2021)
- [Conditional Image-to-Video Generation with Latent Flow Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13744/) (2023)
- [ConsistI2V: Enhancing Visual Consistency for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04324/) (2024)
- [Generative Image Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07906/) (2023)
- [Make It Move: Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02815/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary-steps Image Super-resolution via Diffusion Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09013/) (2024)
- [Jointly Harnessing Prior Structures and Temporal Consistency for Sign Language Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03714/) (2022)
- [I4VGen: Image as Free Stepping Stone for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02230/) (2024)
- [Cinemo: Consistent and Controllable Image Animation with Motion Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15642/) (2024)
- [NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08840/) (2024)
- [Instilling Multi-round Thinking to Text-guided Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08472/) (2024)
- [Synthesizing Forestry Images Conditioned on Plant Phenotype Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03789/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a training-free framework specifically designed to bring real-world static paintings to life through image-to-video (I2V) synthesis, addressing the persistent challenge of aligning these motions with textual guidance while preserving fidelity to the original artworks. Existing I2V methods, primarily trained on natural video datasets, often struggle to generate dynamic outputs from static paintings. It remains challenging to generate motion while maintaining visual consistency with real-world paintings. This results in two distinct failure modes: either static outputs due to limited text-based motion interpretation or distorted dynamics caused by inadequate alignment with real-world artistic styles. We leverage the advanced text-image alignment capabilities of pre-trained image models to guide the animation process. Our approach introduces synthetic proxy images through two key innovations: (1) Dual-path score distillation: We employ a dual-path architecture to distill motion priors from both real and synthetic data, preserving static details from the original painting while learning dynamic characteristics from synthetic frames. (2) Hybrid latent fusion: We integrate hybrid features extracted from real paintings and synthetic proxy images via spherical linear interpolation in the latent space, ensuring smooth transitions and enhancing temporal consistency. Experimental evaluations confirm that our approach significantly improves semantic alignment with text prompts while faithfully preserving the unique characteristics and integrity of the original paintings. Crucially, by achieving enhanced dynamic effects without requiring any model training or learnable parameters, our framework enables plug-and-play integration with existing I2V methods, making it an ideal solution for animating real-world paintings. More animated examples can be found on our project website.