Breathing Life into Character Portraits

After experimenting with landscapes and still paintings, I wanted to see if the same sense of motion could exist inside the faces I’ve painted over the years. The surreal, the mythic, the familiar — each portrait already carried its own quiet pulse. The question was: how much life could I draw out of them?

This became my first real short-form experiment — a moving study focused entirely on my character portraits. Using Runway Gen-4, Veo 3, and Seedance 1.0 Pro, I began animating subtle gestures: a glance, a shifting breath, a flicker of emotion that never existed in the original brushwork. Every attempt felt like meeting these characters again for the first time.

Once a few sequences started to feel convincing, I pulled them into an editing timeline — layering in pacing, sound, and a bit of rhythm. I’ve always loved the editing process, the way timing can shape emotion, and here it transformed static art into something cinematic.

The finished piece isn’t a narrative — it’s a study in presence. How close can a painted face come to feeling alive without losing its surreal edge? These first moving portraits feel like a bridge between art and film, a glimpse of what might be possible as this exploration continues.