Around May 2025, while we were at Snowshoe, I took a photo of my daughter Leia sitting outside after downhill mountain biking. She was still wearing her protective gear.
She told me I couldn’t post the picture. Fair enough. So I changed it.
I used ChatGPT to transform the original photo into a fantasy portrait. The image kept Leia’s recognizable face, expression, hair, and general appearance, while turning her downhill mountain biking protective gear into dragon-scale armor. The ordinary outdoor setting became a dark landscape with mountains and a dragon, and the portrait gained a crown and cape.
I then used DeeVid AI to animate the finished portrait into a short video. That animation was the version I posted to Facebook.
Transformed the photograph into the Dragon Queen portrait.
Animated the finished portrait into a short video.
This was a small, playful experiment, but it showed me how a familiar photograph could become the starting point for a completely different visual story. It also took a couple of steps: first finding a transformation that still felt like Leia, then seeing what happened when the still image moved.