April 29, 1986
The digitizer arrived. I fired it up and quickly determined that the tape I shot in October is useless.
Basically, the digitizer recognizes two shades: black and white. The background needs to be dark enough to be perceived as black even when the brightness is turned up high enough to make David’s arms and face and feet visible.
Second, it can’t reduce or enlarge.
Maybe if I paint his skin white and give him a white turban and shoot it against a black wall?
I still think this can work. The key is not to clean up the frames too much. The figure will be tiny and messy and look like crap… but I have faith that, when the frames are run in sequence at 15 fps, it’ll create an illusion of life that’s more amazing than anything that’s ever been seen on an Apple II screen. The little guy will be wiggling and jittering like a Ralph Bakshi rotoscope job… but he’ll be alive. He’ll be this little shimmering beacon of life in the static Apple-graphics Persian world I’ll build for him to run around in.
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‘The little guy will be wiggling and jittering like a Ralph Bakshi rotoscope job… but he’ll be alive.’
These journals are a real thrill to read, but this wild imagining in particular gives me goosebumps. It’s like a young Dr. Frankenstein preparing his equipment to work an eerie midnight miracle. This is animation in the truest sense of the word, and it’ll set the stage for the next great leap towards credibly alive digital actors, years and years later, in Fumito Ueda’s Ico.
SUPERBROTHERS salutes Mr. Jordan Mechner’s incredible pixel vision!
I was born 5 days ago on this date! I love reading your journals…