“But, as we all know, the individual light bulbs are not moving.”
I linked to palette cycling before, and I was just reminded of palette cycling art by Mark Ferrari, who back in the 1990s made 30+ landscapes that looked like this:
They have been collected on this webpage some 15 years ago, and I’m linking to it in part because it’s also a great explainer of how palette cycling works – you can see the colors move around, you can point to one to see it frozen, and you can see multiple cycles running in parallel, compare palette ranges between different environmental conditions, and turn on a “blended” technique that feels clever and I didn’t realize existed.
The page was made by Joe Huckaby, who wrote a little intro:
Mark J. Ferrari […] invented his own unique ways of using color cycling for envrironmental effects that you really have to see to believe. These include rain, snow, ocean waves, moving fog, clouds, smoke, waterfalls, streams, lakes, and more. And all these effects are achieved without any layers or alpha channels – just one single flat image with one 256 color palette.
The launch was also accompanied by an interview with Ferrari, which is an interesting read – in part because it shows the work was even more elaborate than all of the above:
These versions of the scene are all the same piece of art ‘shifted’ to different palettes, and, in some cases, using additional ‘baked in’ overlays, (such as rain or the lighted windows at night). But those overlays are all ‘baked in’ to the same layer of the same piece of art that appears in any other ‘day-time’ or clear weather iterations, and are all deriving their color and motion from the same palette as the rest of the picture in that state.
While [the page above] finally allows us all to watch these images color cycle online, many of the scenes posted were actually ‘built’ to do much more than merely animate. By fading the one piece of art through whole sets of palettes, sometimes also using a very sparse set of ‘baked in’ overlays, a number of these scenes can go seamlessly through the 24 hour light cycle, and even change weather conditions ‘naturally’ and seamlessly in real time as you watch. I am not just talking about changing the brightness or color scheme of these pictures either. In the images built for it, over the course of ‘sunrise and morning,’ ‘morning to afternoon’ or ‘evening and sunset,’ light and shadow will actually gradually change angle, climb down the sides of things, move across lawns, up cliffs or building walls, as changing light does in life – all just by fading through palette series designed to make those things happen without altering or adding anything at all to the single layer of 8-bit pixel art.
Ferrari also suggests an interesting analog to palette cycling, which I quoted in the title.
Bonus: Ferrari’s animated landscapes were made for a new-age’y personal organizer app called Seize The Day, and on top of the above preservation effort, there is also this independent, extremely retro page from a fan of the app who loved it so much she decided to keep the app itself alive, too.
