8-bit GIFs of Japanese life | Hacker News Reader

8-bit GIFs of Japanese life

designmadeinjapan.com

268 pointsjpatokal62 comments

This is apparently the artist's own page: http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/

The color scheme of this website is really smart. I love how everything is dark except for the GIFs. It gives the "cinema" feel.

> The color scheme of this website is really smart.

Was a little difficult to find the "next page" button though.

Didn't even realise there was one until you pointed it out.

A great selection of his older art on Rocketnews24 (also found on the next page on his Tumblr page):

http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/12/03/all-your-ordinary-mome...

I submitted this guy's artwork some months ago but it didn't get to the frontpage. Finally getting the attention he deserves.

The magic of pixel art like that is that they define a picture but leave the details up to your imagination. Because of that, you subconsciously interpolate in a way that appeals to you, which makes it that much more perfect than high resolution imagery. Well, that's my opinion at least.

Yeah, that's a popular theory. I'm not sure if it's a complete explanation, though.

Pixel art (and other art as well) is often stylized, which means it's trying to present a more appealing version of reality. The viewing angles are carefully chosen, the colors and lights are more vibrant, the shapes of everyday objects are more varied and graceful, the people are better looking, etc. The end result is that you're looking at a rough description of something that you want but don't have.

You could achieve the same effect with a high resolution image, but then you need to make all the little details beautiful as well, which takes much more work. There are certainly high resolution paintings that manage to be as haunting and evocative as the best pixel art, for example Shan Qiao's "Story of the city" (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/story-of-the-city), Nivanh Chantara's "Babiru 02" (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/babiru-02), or pretty much anything on http://reddit.com/r/backgroundart.

>> You could achieve the same effect with a high resolution image

The first animated GIF from the article is based off of this higher resolution image:

http://kusakabeworks.net/gallery/the-house-with-signs-of-mar...

...so it would be interesting to see which people find more appealing.

Some aesthetics categorically reject choice. Everybody else thinks deliberate choice by the artist is what makes art worthwhile. In these gif images, every pixel is chosen for its contribution to the whole. The source photo illustration isn't nearly so rigorous, and IMHO that's what makes it skillful to a point but totally pedestrian and uninteresting. A bit hard to look at, actually. YMMV of course.

Both images are very good. IMO the low-res version [1] has slightly better colors, while the high-res version [2] captures the cloudy weather a bit better, but they feel about equally appealing to me. Note that the high-res image is also very stylized for appeal rather than realism, no one would mistake it for a photo.

[1] http://designmadeinjapan.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/07...

[2] http://kusakabeworks.net/uploads/10102901.jpg

> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

- Brian Eno

This is my favorite quote to bring out when people are discussing the merits (or demerits) of pixel art. It's really spot on.

I knew someone would bring that up. I actually thought about whether I should treat it shortly to prevent someone from parroting it _again_. No, I feel like pixel art is different. I grew up with cassettes and CDs, even some disc records, but no. I hate the lack of quality and distortion so much. I think the quote is superficial and condescending and I do not like it.

Obviously this is just your opinion, but I think Brian Eno completely on point here, for music at least.

The best real-world example I know is the resurgence of cassette tapes. Whenever I go to see a not-very-popular (indie, for want of a better term) band, the merch stand, without fail, has cassettes and vinyls and sometimes no CDs or optional Internet downloads. Is there a practical reason? No, not really, it's all marketing. Making tapes and vinyls is hard, burning CDs is easy, but people want the nostalgia of the more interactive process of flipping tapes and vinyls.

I guess they could be moving to those mediums for the "grit" of the sound produced. But that sound can easily and effectively be reproduced with an equalizer, sound filters and effects.

CDs mean out of touch old fogeys. Cassettes and Vinyl means consciously and fashionably retro.

Yes - I am an out of touch old fogey.

With that being said, low fidelity (of many kinds) lets us imagine things to be prettier than they are.

This is why it is dark in a night club. People look better.

It's not a limitation of the medium, but a function of how we construct images from visual inputs.

A personal example is quick pencil sketches. They always look better to me than if I ink them into proper line art.

But since interpolation is subjective it may lead to incorrect interpretations of the image that are different from the artists' intentions.

It's easier to draw a cartoon then to paint the mona lisa. I respect detail and high resolution artistry more than sketching cartoons due to the higher amount of skill required to pull it off. One screw up in a super high detailed painting and you could end up in the uncanny valley.

Either way, lots of respect for both forms of art.

I think I have read similar thoughts as an explanation for anime characters having so few details compared to their surroundings.

Also reminds me of some of the points made in Understanding Comics[0]

"...Another is the universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe."[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics [1] http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/user_upload/ckeditor/und...

Animated characters have less detail than backgrounds because you need to draw way more character frames than background paintings.

For the amount of passion it seems a lot of animators put into their work it seemed more interesting that there was an artistic decision about how the audience will connect with their character to explain the style and not that it was just too difficult. But that may very well be the case and the other is just a convenient side effect.

A frame of traditional animation looks like this:

http://www.animationsensations.com/media/catalog/product/cac...

That doesn't look too detailed, but imagine drawing four of those every day for a year without weekends. 365 x 4 is about equal to 24 x 60. Congratulations, you've created a minute of footage. To make a feature film, you'll spend a life.

I guess Disney-style animated characters occupy a kind of sweet spot. They are carefully stylized to look good enough that adding more detail won't really make them much better, and simple enough that a large team of animators with top-down planning can make a complete movie in a few years. Japanese anime has slightly more detailed characters, at the cost of having fewer frames per second. If you want a lot more detail with good enough framerate, you need more money than your audience is willing to pay.

It feels like if Edward Hopper was Japanese and born today this is what he'd do.

Like Hopper paintings[1][2], it captures a daily life where lonely people are just part of a landscape, nothing more.

[1] http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/street/

[2] http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/interior/

Absolutely. I think that these kinds of scenes and the feelings they evoke are actually the core component of "8-bit" art. Portraits, still life, most bare landscapes, and many other subjects don't really gain anything from the pixellation effect and perspective that 8-bit art uses.

Also (anecdote incoming), I could show these to my wife and she'd just say they're "cute." They won't evoke the same feeling in her that they do in me, and I'm pretty sure there's exactly one reason - I grew up through the 80s and 90s playing video games, and she didn't. Ask anyone who did they same I'd bet that they'd all immediately say that these look like locations in a JRPG, all of which are generally designed to evoke the feeling that there is real, recognizable life happening in the locations that mostly serve as bus stops for your character's momentous story. That life is generally calm, to offset the stress and momentum of your quest, and the contentment and happiness of it is what makes the world worth saving. It's also got a comfortable routine: the old lady feeding the birds in her yard is always there; the train always comes every 45 seconds; the dog is always chasing the cat; the pretty waitress is always serving coffee. The environment doesn't heave, it gently breathes, and the animation loops forever and ever - the simple machinery of the background never breaks down, unless of course it's always broken, in which case the brokenness is a fixture of the local environment that one really minds.

Also, most of these particular scenes are desaturated and "cold", even rainy or snowy. The feeling of sitting in your warm house looking out the window at the snow or the pouring rain is easy to connect to.

How do I play this game? "pick up dog" isn't working.

I've never even been to Japan and these gifs make me feel nostalgic...I guess for childhood games that used this art style? Very nice.

Wow - way too many feels. I lived in Japan for ~3 years and this brought back so many awesome memories.

I second the notion that keeping it in pixel art form invokes a childhood-like nostalgia.

If someone made a series showing children's progression through the various computer + gaming consoles over the last 30 years I'd probably lose it.

You'd probably enjoy this documentary about the evolution of videogame music in Japan over the last 3 decades (and how it's influenced a bunch of contemporary musicians):

http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7244859/rbma-diggin-in-th...

Stuff like Pac-Man, Sonic, Street Fighter, & Streets of Rage really is a nostalgia bomb.

Awesome - thanks for the link!

Are there any 8-bit games that use nice color palettes like this?

While the pixel resolution is 8-bit the palettes used remind me more of 16-bit games of the early 90s.

There's no "8-bit pixel resolution". The 8-bit means there's only 2^8 = 256 colors in single image. Depending on console, those 256 colors were either pre-selected or you could define your own colors (even modify them in real time).

Those concepts are loosely carried over to modern pixel art. In most cases 256 colors is enough for static pixel art, especially if you avoid gradients (as most artists do).

I always thought 8-bit was referring to the graphics produced by machines with 8-bit processors, in particular the NES.

When talking about graphics that's correct, but I think in this kind of context the "8-bit" refers more to (nostalgic, rose-tinted memories of) the visual style of so-called 8-bit consoles, in particular the NES/Famicom, and most consoles that we consider 8-bit didn't allow for anywhere near 256 colours on-screen. Here the 8-bit qualifier refers to the 6502 CPU's word size; the NES in-particular only had a total palette size of 54 colours [1], and additional colour limitations meant that in practice you'd rarely see more than around ~25 at a time.

Or take the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, a 16-bit console; its colour capabilities didn't give anything close to 2^16 = 65536 on-screen colours. Instead you got a 9-bit palette with only around 64 on-screen colours [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_pal...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_pal...

GIF only supports an 8-bit colour palette (256 colours per frame - albeit colours can be picked from a 24-bit colour space), so it's definitely an 8-bit colour palette.

There's no such thing as an 8-bit pixel resolution. In fact even amongst the 8-bit consoles, their output resolutions differed: NES: 256x240; Master System: 256x192; Game Gear & Gameboy: 160x144; and the Atari 7800 supported a few different resolutions.

I would check out Hyper Light Drifter. Similar palettes and amazing music. It is not out yet, but the trailer on the Kickstarter page is beautiful.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1661802484/hyper-light-...

I don't know if Risk of Rain[0] counts. Also, the music is fantastic.

[0] http://riskofraingame.com/

I bought that game recently. I really should play it some more. It's a very fun game.

Sworcery also has this kind of muted colors.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4GIsmwnlpg

I think Cave Story might be an inspiration for some of these.

Cave Story and its entire soundtrack were also created by a single Japanese person. Really great game.

I don't know why this is so great.

It makes you want to visit Japan, doesn't it? Somehow, everything in these images feels at peace.

What would be an easy way to hook these up to a simple display and make 'movable' wall art?

Yes, it does.

Unrelated question:

Some of the pictures show people on their digital devices, at work or otherwise. Has the quality of customer service dropped with the ubiquity of smart phones?

I believe it has here in the US, but I think that there is a general culture shift driving the drop in quality as well and that the phones are just enabling the problem.

Very beautiful pieces of art. *Hacking a digital picture frame to make it daily cycling through them is now #9 on your todowhenyouhaveafewhourslist

Reminds me of "Another World" so much I had a flashback of the feel of my old Slik Stik. Amiga games that should have been?

Are there other GIFs than 8-bit?

If your question is "Can GIFs not be 8-bit", the answer is yes. You can use frames from a movie or output a flash vector animation into as jif.

More than 256 colours at a time?

Yes.

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/304/can-i-have...

GIF has 256-colour palettes, but they're not restricted to 8-bit colour depth, and you can have a dedicated palette per tile, so you can, theoretically, use full 24-bit colour depth.

If you don't mind the resulting image file being bigger than a BMP.

Huh — is the ability to use a separate palette per tile often done in practice? I have used quite a few gif creation tools over the years, and they all seemed to support only a fixed palette...

No, because it's inefficient as hell (I wasn't joking when I said "less efficient than uncompressed bitmaps", it really is), and not all viewers support it.

Yep. We used up its bandwidth.

Hosted at Bluehost.com. Like other hosts (charging only I see now "$3.95/month") they promise you "unlimited bandwidth". The TOS then defines "unlimited" in a way that let's them do things like this. Meanwhile the more honest webhost is at a disadvantage in trying to compete with this scheme.

Shared hosting is a mugs game these days and has been for a long time, both for the hosts and the users. The only way to compete on any scale other than "hosting stuff for family & friends or your own clients" is to be deliberately deceptive in this way. Another common trick is "unlimited databases of any size (but we'll limit I/O so much that it'll never be practical to store more than some tens of Mb)".

I used to run a small host many years ago. I quickly got out of the business.

There are three classes of people still using shared hosting:

1. Those who know the game but to whom it really doesn't matter: they have little content and/or it is of such niche interest that they are not going to be anywhere near the limits associated with "unlimited". They are aware of the game and using a shared host is either habit or just the quickest way to put the files.scripts out there. They have little or no budget - as soon as they need to pay anything they'll switch to a VPS (but can't be bothered running one right now as they don't need to immediately).

2. Those who don't know any better and who have bought into the marketing of the other hosts. They will expect you to provide the same (or more) for the same (or less) that the other hosts are promising and when you tell them that you can't they will be disappointed, sometimes incredulous, even occasionally offended (as if you telling them it is not possible to make money that way is insulting, i.e. telling them their expectations are wrong is tantamount to telling them they are stupid).

3. Those who know the game full well are and playing it to the max. They've already been pushed off several hosts for using too much of their "unlimited" resources and fully expect to get pushed off yours at some point too (though they'll still kick up an almighty fuss when it does actually happen).

Class 1 won't spend any money, class 2 and 3 will want to pay very little and will eventually try to kill your business via bad reviews when you let them go or otherwise don't give them what they demand.

We still do a nominal amount of legacy hosting (dates back to the 90's so why give up the money?) and had a long time customer switch because his brother offered to do it for free. He also switched the domain name as well which ended up in the hands (ownership that is) of the hosting company. So he doesn't know it but he isn't the owner of the domain any more. I've actually seen that happen many times. Someone transfer a domain and all of the sudden the whois shows the name of the tech guy, or even (this case) the hosting company is the actual owner. Small business guy site owner is clueless as to what is going on. It's hard to sell people on things that might happen to them because there are multiple things that could happen. And if you take the time to do so, that is to fully educate them, they know what to look out for and you still lose the business.

It didn't add much perceivable value to the artist's own page anyway, other than not being a tumblr site. http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/

> not being a tumblr site

You mean, not being a site that can tolerate the load when linked from a popular link sharing site.

I know I've seen this before. Maybe /r/cinemagraphs.

I love these, they have such a comfy feel to them.

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