Recreating the look of outdated "computer" graphics

April 8, 2022 8:56 AM

How would I go about recreating this animation (with all the brands and logos changed and new text, of course) with no experience doing so? And how hard would that be?

Or this one. Same general idea. I'm using my own logos but I want something that is recognizable as "like the Sega CD startup screen" for people who know what that is, and "like '90s rudimentary computer animation" for people who don't.

The best answer I can come up with as a person with very little to no experience is: draw the logo(s) by hand with pixel art, animate the color-changing manually frame-by-frame, then import the logo(s) to Adobe After Effects and figure out how to animate them. Take those elements, put them together in Premiere, then export as a video.

I have access to the Adobe suite of products and Final Cut Pro, but if the right result isn't possible with what I've got, I'm definitely willing to use other software. Also: time isn't especially critical. I can take as long as I need (within reason; I can learn new software but not program new software, e.g.) to make it.

Failing all that, if the right answer is to commission a real digital artist, any advice on where to go for that would also be appreciated.

posted by penduluum to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Best answer: For what it's worth, the process you described is exactly how I'd do it. I'd use Blender, because I don't have access to an Adobe subscription, but the idea's the same.

A few things to note in search of that look: Lower the framerate (that looks like 15 fps, maybe lower -- you could measure by importing into your video editor and looking at how many 30fps frame each animation frame occupies). Make sure you're using nearest neighbor resampling, rather than anything more modern/clever ("better" rescaling algorithms like bilinear interpolation, etc, will not maintain the pixel-art look). Pick a color palette and stick to it -- that era of graphics hardware could display fewer colors and that's part of the look. I can't remember exactly what SegaCD could do, but I'm sure it's documented on wikipedia or similar.

You might want to look up "palette swapping" as an animation technique. To get more out of less hardware, sometimes these color cycling animations were made by programmatically changing what display color maps to what color in the input image. The result is that the colors change, but the relative positions of the colors stay the same, if that makes any sense? I can't think of an easy way to do that in After Effects / Blender (I might just write a little piece of code in something like Python to do this; there might be a clever trick to do it in an animation tool though)..
posted by Alterscape at 9:13 AM on April 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Best answer: If you want the old looks, you need to render the output in deliberately low resolution, like 320x200, with a limited color palette and a low frame rate 12-15 fps. That should make it sufficiently janky.
posted by kschang at 10:39 AM on April 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Palette Swapping, nice. Try also Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis of a General MIDI track for the music.
posted by k3ninho at 10:56 AM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

These are good suggestions; consider using a CRT filter on top of the pixelation filter. The palette animation could be simulated with an hue-shifting animation on one of the layers.

You could also import your graphics into one of the available retro graphics tools to dither and crunch colors appropriately.

The absolute *best* way would be to download one of the homebrew SDKs and write your own demo; of course this takes some doing. In any case try to respect the limitations of the hardware: you only get (I think) three layers, and there are memory limitations -- the graphics are made up of 8x8 tiles, which are often reused throughout the scene, as there is not enough RAM to have multiple full screens of unique tiles. Thus, if your logo is also made with a common set of 8x8 tiles, you'll vastly increase the verisimilitude.
posted by credulous at 5:04 PM on April 8, 2022

The color changing is color cycling: You only have to draw one image, and then you change the color palette to achieve the animation.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 7:05 PM on April 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Did you specifically want to do it by yourself? If not, you can probably find someone to do it for you on a site like fiverr or upwork.
posted by McNulty at 9:25 PM on April 8, 2022