How to make a photo dance
You make a photo dance by handing it to an AI along with a reference clip of the movement you want: the model reads the pose out of the reference frame by frame and redraws the subject from your photo in each of those poses.
The photo does one job and the template does the other
Nothing in your photo moves. The model is not animating the pixels you uploaded — it generates a new frame for every frame of the reference clip, using your photo as the answer to the question of what this subject looks like.
That split explains most of what follows. The template decides the choreography, the framing and the length. The photo decides the face, the body, the clothes and the background. They are two separate decisions, so make them separately.
It does not have to be a person
The subject needs a shape a pose can be mapped onto — a head, two arms, two legs — but it does not need to be human, and in practice most of what people animate is not. A dog, a cat, a plush toy, a cartoon character, a cucumber with a face on it: all of them work, and the non-human ones often work better, because nobody knows exactly how a cucumber's knees are supposed to bend.
This is also the forgiving route into it. An uncanny frame on a photo of your face is uncomfortable; an uncanny frame on a dancing raccoon is the joke.
What the photo has to have
One subject, alone in the frame, head to toe, upright, roughly facing the camera. A dance template needs to see the limbs it is about to move; if the legs are cropped at the knee, the model invents legs, and invented legs are the thing people notice first.
Even light beats a good camera. A phone photo taken outdoors under cloud works better than a sharp indoor shot with a hard shadow across the face, because a shadow the model reads as a feature gets carried into every frame.
What it will not do
It will not preserve a busy background. Everything behind the subject is regenerated too, and detailed backgrounds drift over a long clip — a bookshelf becomes a different bookshelf by the end.
It will not fix a bad photo. A blurred face stays blurred across every frame, and now it is blurred and moving.