Replace the character in a video by editing just one frame

You give it two things: a driving video and one frame from that same video with the character repainted, in any image editor or with an image model. The model carries the edit across every frame, so a person doing a kick becomes a corgi, a robot, or a clay figure doing the same kick, on the same background.

What it does not need is the point. There is no pose skeleton, no mask, no face crop, and no text prompt. Because the reference frame comes from the clip itself, its pose and framing already match the footage. That is also why it holds up under fast motion: whipping head turns and full jumps track frame for frame instead of smearing. And since nothing in the loop assumes a human body, it animates animals, an airliner with wings bound to the actor's arms, and several characters in one shot.

It is a finetune of MiniMax-H3's video model, distilled so a five-second shot renders in about 26 seconds on a data-center GPU, roughly six times faster than Wan2.2-Animate.

Start with the official demo Space. Upload a four-to-ten-second clip and a still of your character; the Space repaints the first frame for you and renders the swap. A good first test is a clip with a sharp head turn or a jump, paired with a character whose body shape differs from the actor's, and watch whether the pose lands on the right frame. One honest note: the render needs the largest GPU tier on Hugging Face, which in practice means a PRO account. On a free account, scroll to the finished examples at the bottom of the page instead. Running it yourself needs a 96 GB card or CPU offloading.

Body shape follows the filmed pose, not your repaint, so a LEGO figure kept its colors and drifted back to human proportions. Lip sync is weak in close-ups, and several characters interacting or a shot that cuts is where quality drops. The weights fall under the MiniMax H3 community license, so read it before shipping a product on them.

• Replace a stand-in actor with an animated character for a short film or ad.
• Turn a phone clip of yourself into a mascot doing the same dance, no rigging.
• Try a costume or cosplay design on real footage before building it.
• Animate a robot or a plane with a human performer's motion.

Try the demo

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