Dancing Stick Figures: An Introductory Dataset for Training Video Generation Models

Training a video-generation model from scratch is hard for reasons that precede model design. The feedback loop is long: a failure that appears only after a training run can make each attempted fix another run. The data are hard to reach: the corpora and recipes behind strong models are large, heterogeneous, and often unreleased. And scoring is blunt: open-ended generation has no single correct output, and an aggregate score does not by itself establish whether a sample succeeds or which property failed. Dancing Stick Figures is a synthetic video dataset built against these three obstacles. For iteration speed, its 64x64, 64-frame reference task is sized for practical repeated training on a single workstation GPU. For accessibility, the release is a 0.79-GB training tier of 4,020 video clips--1,340 six-second source motions, each rendered from three cameras by a deterministic dataset-generation harness--with checkpoints and a Colab workflow that reruns the reference training pipeline at reduced budget on a 16 GB Tesla T4. For scoring, every frame retains its generating state (ARDY cskel27 joint positions, camera, body parameters, and source motion) and per-pixel depth, surface normals, and part labels. These annotations support dataset-specific metrics for visible topology and part-wise motion; corruptions expose their sensitivities and blind spots.