Characters and dialogue are now part of Yeşilçam Animation: you can add up to four named characters to a project, show the studio what they look like, give each one a voice and have them speak to each other. The narrator no longer has to carry the whole film. This post explains what you can set, how the pieces fit, and what we learned while building it.
Why we built a cast into animation
The first version of our character styles worked like a picture book read aloud: one narrator, pictures that followed the text. It was lovely for bedtime stories and useless for almost everything else. A sketch comedy needs two people interrupting each other. A product story needs a customer who asks the question your audience is already asking. A lesson opener works better when a child character gets it wrong first. None of that is possible if the characters are silent and nobody knows their names.
So we set ourselves a simple goal: you should be able to say “this is Mira, this is Oskar, they argue about the map” and get exactly that.
Building your cast
Open Characters (it is marked optional) and press Add character. Each character needs a Name, which is used in the story and in the dialogue, so write it the way it should be spoken. Then describe the look in the field Look: colors, outfit, accessories, or press Upload image and give the studio a picture.
- You can add up to four characters per project.
- Images can be JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 25 MB; they are resized in your browser before upload.
- When an image is present, it wins over the text description, and the drawings follow it.
- Each character can have a Voice: leave it on Voice: auto or pick one from the male and female voices.
Characters are available in all ten Cinemation styles, in Foliomation and in Puppetmation. Puppetmation takes a description only, because the puppets are built from jointed paper parts rather than drawn from a reference. Our guide on adding your own characters has tips on what makes a good reference image.
Four ways to use the voice
The Speech selector decides who talks.
- Narrator: one narrator voice tells the story, as before.
- Dialogue: the characters speak to each other and there is no narrator. This is the mode for scenes.
- Both: a narrator sets things up and the characters have lines in between. Most story adaptations end up here.
- Silent: no voice, music only. When nobody speaks, the music is mixed louder, so the film does not feel empty.
Captions can be switched On or Off. In dialogue, captions show the speaker’s name, which helps a lot on phones where many people watch without sound. Speech is available in all the character styles except Puppetmation.
Who writes the lines
You have three choices, and you can mix them across projects.
- Leave it empty and the director writes the dialogue from your story and your cast.
- Tick I will write the dialogue and enter each line yourself: pick the Speaker, type the Line, press Add line. You can write up to 30 lines of up to 200 characters each, and they are used exactly as written.
- Press Write dialogue with Sam to get a draft from your story and characters. It costs a small number of tokens, shown when it finishes, and you can edit the result before you create the film.
The second option is our favourite for brand work, where a line can be a legal promise. The third is the best way to get unstuck. We wrote a whole guide on writing dialogue with AI, including how to brief it.
What happens to a line
In the eight Cinemation styles animated by a video model, a line is not just played over the picture. The video model animates the speaking character’s mouth, then the line is voiced in that character’s fixed voice and aligned word by word with the mouth movement. The result is that Mira sounds like Mira in scene one and in scene nine. Shadowmation and Pixelmation are drawn by a 2.5D animation engine instead, so there each line is still voiced in the character’s fixed voice and captioned with the speaker’s name, but the mouth is not animated. We explain why we chose that approach over generic lip sync in lip sync that keeps the voice.
What we learned
Names matter more than we expected. A character called “the girl” gets confused with every other girl in the scene; a character called Mira does not. Short, distinct names also make captions easier to read. Descriptions matter less than images: two sentences about colors and one accessory usually beat a paragraph. And dialogue should be shorter than you think. Lines that read well on the page often run long when spoken, and a 30-second film holds fewer words than most people guess.
We also learned to respect silence. The Silent mode was an afterthought and turned into one of the most used options for looping social content and mood pieces, especially with the music turned up.
Try it
Take a scene you already know well, two characters and a disagreement, and make it in Dialogue mode at 30 seconds in Celmation or Toonmation. Then switch to Both and add a one-line narrator introduction. The difference between the two versions is the best explanation of this feature we can offer. Start on the Animation page.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters can one animation have? Up to four characters per project, each with a name, a look description or reference image, and a voice.
Which styles support characters? The ten Cinemation styles, Foliomation and Puppetmation. Puppetmation uses a text description only, without image upload.
Can I write the dialogue myself? Yes. Choose I will write the dialogue and enter up to 30 lines, each up to 200 characters; your lines are used as written.
Do captions show who is speaking? Yes. With Captions set to On, dialogue captions include the speaker’s name.