The ‘my first Sony Animation Computer’ (Sony HB-B7000, HB-B7070) Japhy Riddle 2026-09-22 | The ‘my first Sony Animation Computer’ (Sony HB-B7000, HB-B7070)
Pirouette (loop) Japhy Riddle 2025-02-21 | Eleven frames from footage of Galina Ulanova from 1940 printed out, cut, and reassembled. I cut the prints in half, and reordered the frames for the top half so they run in reverse. Of course something like this could be done with a computer more easily, but I love working with physical objects.#ballet #stopmotion #loop
Three computer generated worlds depicting everyday life Japhy Riddle 2025-01-29 | These ideas popped into my head, and I didn’t question or reject any of them. This is not the first time that both toast and rockets have ended up in one of my videos. I modeled and rendered everything in Nuke, which is really not meant to be used for anything like this. The video was transferred to VHS and back to add some analog artifacts and roughness.The sound effects are a combination of recorded sounds, and synthesized sounds made with an Ensoniq ESQ-1.#3danimation #lowpoly #vhs
Toaster (rubber stamp animation) Japhy Riddle 2025-01-21 | A simple toaster animation made with the PRIXEL DIY Rubber Stamp Kit (https://prixel.com). As someone who makes pixel art from time to time, but loves working with physical materials, this grid-based stamp press is right up my alley.I started this toaster animation months ago, but got stuck while trying to do something involving music with it. It sat on the shelf until I picked it up again, abandoning my previous idea, and adding a rocket launch at the end instead.3... 2... 1... Toast Off!#prixel #toaster #stopmotion
Voxel slugs traversing an invisible spinning cubes edges Japhy Riddle 2025-01-13 | How this little animation came to be: I started with a question: Can all the edges of a cube be traced with a continuous line without any retracing? Lacking any experience with graph theory, at first it wasn’t obvious to me. But once I thought about how each vertex had three edges coming together, it was very clear that no single path could arrive at these corners only once. This would seem to be true for any 3D polygonal shape [edit: I was wrong about that]. My next thought was: If there are multiple tracers with short tails, can they trace all the sides without bumping into each other?I made an animated 3D model out of voxels to see what that would look like. Each “slug” (a 6-voxel-long tracer) takes alternating “left” and “right” turns (it’s hard to explain what I mean by that) on an invisible rotating 4x4 cube. The yellow slug has opposite chirality from the red and blue ones because... well, it made the thing work without causing any collisions somehow.Each slug was printed out separately (maintaining its occlusions from the others) as black on white with a laser printer, 48 frames to a page. The pages were scanned whole, and then an animated raster-like crop was programmed to put each frame in order. I liked the registration errors, so nothing was stabilized. The luminance was inverted and then a unique color was applied to each slug. That’s it.I find it mesmerizing.#voxelart #computeranimation #printing
You Typed a Dog Japhy Riddle 2025-01-04 | You typed a dog too.Here are virtually all the dogs people typed into the comment section of the youtu.be/huYpeHW7eGM?si=qIbV6pZgZfXEJ9eR video, before 2025 (I had to draw the line somewhere). Omitted are the ASCII renditions of non-dogs, as well as dogs that strayed too far outside the basic form.What a collection! I couldn’t have asked for a better present : )You can step through the video frame by frame with triple-taps of the , and . keys.#dog #comment #asciiart
I cant seem to get rid of this computer (Vadem Clio) Japhy Riddle 2024-12-27 | The Vadem (MainStreet Networks in my case) Clio is quirky. I made a simple video to showcase a couple of interesting things about it. A list of sorries for this video: The ugly moiré patterns from filming the Clio’s screen, the minimal amount of artwork and music, how scruffy I look, and some lighting mistakes that you probably won’t care about.Hopefully, I can use this computer for something artistic at some point. Until then, I can at least amuse myself.Enjoy.Thank you, Callie Day, for recording my voice : )#vademclio #retrocomputing #aardvark
A winding brushstroke of paper triangles Japhy Riddle 2024-12-19 | Inspired by one of the brushes from Kid Pix. Stop-motion with paper cut-outs. Each color of triangle has a specific sound associated with it as it pops into existence. The y-position determines the pitch of those sounds. I recorded staccato things like cowbells, glass cups, pizzicato strings, etc. The sound turned out rather annoying actually.#stopmotion #triangles #papercraft
Ice Cream Disguised as Business Japhy Riddle 2024-12-11 | Paper cut-outs and transparency film.#papercraft #icecream #art
Duck and Chicken Stroll (ImageWriter II color animation test) Japhy Riddle 2024-11-24 | I made this 4-frame animation loop to test out the color ribbon I got from http://maceffects.com for my Apple ImageWriter II dot matrix printer. It’s so thrilling to watch color come out of this machine. The graphics were made in PixelPaint on my Macintosh IIci. The sound was created with the Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer. I seem to have a knack for simulating animal sounds with filtered sawtooth waves. Although, I’m sure they could sound much better if I spent a little more time playing around with various envelopes. #dotmatrix #pixelart #animation
Outtakes from scanner/CRT/camera experiment Japhy Riddle 2024-11-20 | This image sequence is the result of making flat-bed scans of a CRT displaying the feed from a video camera aimed at the scanner’s bright light during its scans. The camera was moved by hand the whole time each scan in a haphazard manner. You can see the camera’s liquid-like paths of motion on the right.It’s like all three devices are looking at themselves/each other in a funhouse mirror.I kept doing attempts until I got a composition I liked. You can see the take that I picked on my Instagram account: http://www.instagram.com/japhyriddle#scannerart #crt #japhyriddle
Stamp Cat Japhy Riddle 2024-11-19 | My first test print made with the Prixel DIY Rubber Stamp Kit (https://prixel.com). What a fun art toy/tool. Designing graphics with it takes much of the same discipline as designing pixel art, but with some added twists and turns. And the result ends up on paper instead of a screen... well, this ended up on a screen as well. I'm going to make more stamp animations now that I'm getting the hang of it.#prixel #stamp #cat
Dancing Robot (Lights Alive) Japhy Riddle 2024-11-16 | A dancing/exercising robot created with a vintage toy by Tomy called Lights Alive. The toy doesn't have any animation features. I just did a simple stop-motion with it by taking pictures of the screen.Here’s an unnecessarily long explanation of the toy... because I’m me:Lights Alive is a drawing toy which allows for the creation of illuminated pixel art, similar to the more-popular “Lite Brite” toy.It contains a small incandescent backlight situated behind a rotatable color filter and a 31 x 23 array of little holes (or “cells”), each stuffed with a transparent ball and a tiny window shutter.When a shutter is closed (its default state), it blocks the light from shining through its cell. By gently pressing a ball down deeper into its cell, the ball becomes wedged in a position which forces open the shutter, thus allowing light to shine through that particular cell.To push the balls down, a set of tools is included: Four simple-shape stamps, and two straight line tools (one for orthogonals, one for diagonals) akin to spiky pizza cutters. On the butts of the handles of the straight line tools are little pokers, which allow for the easy poking of individual cells.Unfortunately, there is no way to pull an individual ball back up, and seal off the light again for that cell, besides resetting the whole screen*. The reset is done by pushing the screen away from you, running it along a tined roller underneath it that pushes the balls back up.Another feature is a little wheel at the bottom edge of the toy which can rotate a multi-colored filter in front of the backlight. It really makes the lights alive!*You can actually erase the screen row by row from the top if you perform the reset slowly enough. Because of this, the best technique for drawing is to start at the bottom, and draw upwards row by row. If you make a mistake, you’ll only have to clear enough rows to undo the error, not the whole image.#stopmotion #robot #lightsalive
Smaller Than Pixel Art: Sub-Pixel Art! Japhy Riddle 2024-11-14 | A video about making sub-pixel art? I don't know what's wrong with me, ha ha.[Sorry for the error at 2:33. I accidentally listed red as white. There's also no good reason why I kept all the graphics 1-bit instead of using "greyscale".]I started making this video awhile ago, but I ran out of steam half-way through. Nevertheless, I forced myself to finish it. I hope you get something out of it. I also hope that it still applies somewhat to the current state of computer screens, but I may be too out of date.For the record, this isn't supposed to be the ultimate video on sub-pixels. There's certainly more that could have been said about the subject. It's just supposed to be fun... for us nerds : ) #pixelart #subpixel #japhyriddle
Box Japhy Riddle 2024-11-07 | What a drag.I made this with paper cut-outs in 2020. I filmed my arm doing that motion, and then printed out every frame. There are three repeated frames for the box, to give it a jiggly quality.Callie Day made the music.#stopmotion #box #arm
Hole Punch Japhy Riddle 2024-11-05 | A short video featuring hole punching. Live action + stop-motion animation. Synth sound made with an Ensoniq ESQ-1 keyboard.#holepunch #worm #stopmotion
Raining Japhy Riddle 2024-10-16 | People bustling about under their umbrellas in a light rain. A 24-frame animated loop drawn with colored pencils.#stopmotion #umbrella #rain
I Typed a Dog Japhy Riddle 2024-10-15 | My typewriter is very limited in its character set. However, I was able to create this dog-like critter with the machine’s available characters... and play with it a little bit.A cool thing about doing text art on a typewriter, as opposed to ASCII art on a computer, is the ability to overlap characters.For some reason, it took me ages to do sound for this. It wasn’t complicated or anything. I kept just making stuff that I didn’t like. I’m still not completely happy with it, but I had to move on.#asciiart #typewriter #stopmotion
Lots of Windows 95 Recycle Bins Japhy Riddle 2024-10-04 | Windows 95 Recycle Bin piece.Made with Windows 95 running in DOSBox, running in Windows XP, running in Parallels on my Mac (it kept crashing with the Mac version of DOSBox).These Recycle Bins are actually shortcuts to an empty folder on the root drive, with their icons changed. Normally, shortcuts are marked with a little arrow in the lower left corner of the icon, but I deleted some things in the Windows registry to disable those. I think Tweak UI has that option as well, but I didn’t have it installed.Each fake Recycle Bin has a unique number of spaces in its filename.Maybe I should do another piece with trash cans in Macintosh System 7.
Kick Japhy Riddle 2024-09-24 | Kick. A short stop-motion animated loop that I drew by hand. There are 86 frames of animation in this loop, but I only had to draw 43 because the second half is just the first half flopped. I didn’t have decent pens in the colors I wanted, so I just used a pink highlighter and altered the colors with a computer. The sound was made with an Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer.#kick #stopmotion #loop
Voxel Pig made with Digital Nendo Japhy Riddle 2024-09-08 | A pig I created with Digital Nendo, a piece of voxel-based modeling software from 1996 for Macintosh computers. “Nendo” means clay in Japanese.This is my first ever attempt at making something with voxels. Sorry for the loud colors. The program doesn’t give you many choices to work with.#pig #voxelart #digitalnendo
This page intentionally left blank. This page intentionally right blank. Japhy Riddle 2024-09-07 | This page intentionally left blankThis page intentionally right blank#wordplay #funny #videoart
Relearning Fantavision on the Apple II Japhy Riddle 2024-09-04 | While relearning how to use Fantavision on the Apple II (it had been a few years), I quickly made this as a test. I was charmed by it, so here it is.#fantavision #chicken #appleii
Apple Tree Japhy Riddle 2024-09-03 | Apple Tree. 90 sloppy hand-drawn frames of animation.How cool would it have been if the red apples had turned into the original shape of the leaves, and then green apples grew just like the reds? Repeat: red, green, red, green, etc. Hindsight.#appletree #stopmotion #handanimated
1x1 Pixel Image of Garfield Japhy Riddle 2024-08-31 | A curious and humorous look into a piece of “art” that I shared with a pixel art community, presented in a 1:1 aspect ratio.See my real artwork here: instagram.com/japhyriddle#pixelart #garfield #japhyriddle
Cat Stack Flipbook Japhy Riddle 2024-08-25 | Just a little flipbook I made for the animation class I teach.#flipbook #cat #animation
Cat sliding down a curved slope (pencil and eraser animation) Japhy Riddle 2024-08-20 | This sliding cat was first modeled in the computer, and then traced frame by frame with pencil onto a single sheet of paper. Since pencil can never be fully erased, little remnants of each frame continually build up as the animation plays. It’s a cool look, and it saves paper : )Also, I just had to include an inverted version because light lines on dark backgrounds are always so pretty. #cat #stopmotion #rotoscoping
Two Dancing Apples Japhy Riddle 2024-08-17 | Two dancing apples. Created with Animation Works on a Macintosh SE. Sound made with ConcertWare and MacDrums. The apples have no connection with Apple computers. I just wanted to make dancing apples.My Instagram has many cute short things like this:instagram.com/japhyriddle#macintosh #apples #pixelart
TRS-80 MC-10 Instrument Japhy Riddle 2024-08-12 | Guitar MC-10 was a simple program I wrote in BASIC in 2016, when I had a tiny RadioShack TRS-80 MC-10 computer. All the program did was beep in different frequencies when pressing the letter/number keys. The sound output was run through some effects processors to make it sound a little more interesting. I “tuned” it like a guitar/bass: chromatically across the keyboard, with each row of keys being a ‘May’ (4th) apart. I sold the computer shortly after this.#trs80 #instrument #retrotech
Hedge Japhy Riddle 2024-08-09 | Obviously.A 28-frame hand-drawn animated loop.#animation #hedgehog #stopmotion
Trot Japhy Riddle 2024-07-25 | Trot at your own pace. The graphics were made using a computer. The sounds were made using an Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer.#voxels #computeranimation #dog
Driving Japhy Riddle 2024-07-22 | Driving. I had intended to make just a simple and rough picture, but it turned into a simple and rough animation. It ended up looking like something Saul Steinburg would have drawn.#stomotion #driving #animation
Japhy Riddle - Eight Days Awake Japhy Riddle 2024-07-18 | New music:japhyriddle.bandcamp.com/album/four-songs-awake-epThis video is just the album cover with the painting replaced by an oscilloscope screen displaying the song's waveform.I have so many excuses for why this isn’t the perfect and most representative music for my current artistic identity, and why the production doesn’t sound that good because of when and how it was recorded, but wouldn’t it be better to simply say that here is some music I made that you can listen to? Enjoy : )#japhyriddle #music #progressiverock
Pushing A Button Made Out Of Buttons Japhy Riddle 2024-07-05 | A handmade hand made of buttons pushing a button made of buttons. But on and on it’s off and on. More often off than on. Made for the animation class I teach as an example of rotoscoping. I first filmed a reference video of my hand performing this action. Then I placed all the buttons on a lying-down computer monitor to match the video of my hand every frame, turning the monitor off every time I took a picture.#buttons #stopmotion rotoscoping
Newtons Cradle Shirt Japhy Riddle 2024-06-29 | A humorous design concept for a shirt which lets its wearer simulate a Newton’s cradle. This demo was created with pieces of paper taped to a black shirt. Callie Day helped me greatly with the positioning of the circles and my body on camera.#newtonscradle #fashion #nerd
Marbles and Sailboats (My first cel animation) Japhy Riddle 2024-06-25 | I made my first ever traditional cel animation. I’d always wanted to try it out. All the imperfections with registration are satisfying to me. I only painted 24 cels, but it’s a loop so you can watch it forever. I did a little pan and scan in post to make it more engaging. Out of all animation mediums I’ve played with, this was one of the most arduous ones. I really like the aesthetic though.Sound was made with a glockenspiel, synthesizer, and various downloaded sound samples. Sorry about that noisy pyramid.This was created for the animation course I teach: dogbotic.com/animating-by-hand
Moles Japhy Riddle 2024-06-14 | Moles. Holes. 40 hand-drawn frames of animation. I could have done a bunch of copy and paste with a computer, but I decided to actually draw 16 moles/holes 40 times. Sound was made entirely with whistles.#moles #holes #goals
O/II/II/II... (RECORD/PAUSE/PAUSE/PAUSE...) Japhy Riddle 2024-06-13 | A recording of the record button so to speak... well, mostly the pause button which starts and stops the tape. There are many ways of pushing this button.I wanted this to feel like an early-80s video art piece, so I used VHS, and the dreadful Sharp QC-54 as my camera. Look it up. You’ll laugh. I chose an old Zenith 24-2892 remote control for its beautiful blandness.Since the camera has autoexposure (with no way of turning it off), the picture goes rather dark when the metal part of the remote reflects too much light into the lens.
Bucket Fill Pixilation (Connectix QuickCam + MacPaint) Japhy Riddle 2024-06-10 | A little pixilation (stop-motion using people) made with an old Connectix QuickCam (the first commercially available webcam). The pictures were captured on a Macintosh IIci computer. The QuickCam is capable of capturing in greyscale, but I went with good old 1-bit mode (just blacks and whites and nothing in between). Besides just wanting a 1-bit aesthetic, it also allowed for some MacPaint graphics to be easily added to some of the frames, and for the movie to be displayed on older Macintosh machines that only support 1-bit color. Converting the QuickCam movie into MacPaint files was a gigantic headache though. Anyway, a program called MacMovies can compile a series of MacPaint files into a propriety video format, and play them fullscreen at up to 30 frames a second. That’s really amazing for 1985 technology.The sound was made using ConcertWare (another ancient Mac program), some layered samples from Kid Pix, and some sounds I recorded.I teach a stop-motion course through @dogbotic. When I give homework, I also do the assignments. This was what I did for the pixilation lesson.Yes, I made a cardboard paint can icon.#pixilation #quickcam #stopmotion
Channel F Party Japhy Riddle 2024-05-31 | A time-lapse (recorded on VHS) of me drawing a collection of creatures using the Fairchild Channel F game console with the Doodle program on Videocart 1.For the record, it’s really arduous to draw with the Channel F. Using a really weird joystick, you move around a cursor that leaves a colored trail. You can switch between three colors + light grey by rotating the top of the stick. There’s no way to “lift the pen” so if you want to pass the cursor over an area you’ve already done some graphics on, you’ll need to redraw each pixel as you go.You get a 63x58 pixel workspace to make your image, although the bottom two corners are somewhat off-limits... it’s hard to explain.The audio was made on an Atari 2600: japhyriddle.bandcamp.com/album/atari-music#pixelart #channelf #fairchild
The Sky - Making color art with my dot matrix printer (Apple ImageWriter II) Japhy Riddle 2024-05-24 | Don’t ask me why it’s hot air balloons, taxi cabs, fish, and a few baseballs. That’s just what the brain dug up. This is a print made with an 80s dot matrix printer (Apple ImageWriter II). Lacking an actual color ribbon, I printed black onto a variety of colored sheets of paper, and then collaged everything together. It’s some of the tiniest cut-out work I’ve ever done.The graphics were made entirely with MacPaint on an old Macintosh computer.I made the music in this video with a glockenspiel. Lots of layers of glockenspiel, some run though various effects.P.S. I didn’t have a good sky-colored piece of paper to print on, so I used a sheet of cyanotype paper. This means that the final picture can never be viewed in direct sunlight. The sky will fade to white (and deep blue if it gets wet).#dotmatrix #printing #pixelart
Anteater Japhy Riddle 2024-05-16 | I very short animated film I made back in 2016. It still tickles me.#stopmotion #anteater #funny
Jumping Orange Juice Japhy Riddle 2024-05-15 | Jumping Orange Juice. Stop-motion animation with felt cut-outs. This was my cut-out animation homework assignment for the @dogbotic stop-motion course I’m teaching. I like to also do the homework that I assign.Since I wanted the fronts of the cups to always be in front of the juice, I glued them to a piece of glass on a hinge (well, more like some pieces of tape). The glass inconsistently landed every time I put it back down, which made it rather jiggly. I decided to just make the whole animation jiggly so the glass inaccuracies didn’t look so out of place. I’m into roughness these days, so I welcome this kind of thing.The hardest part about working with glass is trying to avoid reflections while doing the kind of lighting that minimizes harsh shadows. I had to animate in basically a black pillow fort.
Tack (Etch A Sketch Animator 2000) Japhy Riddle 2024-04-13 | My first Etch A Sketch Animator 2000 animation. For more cute things like this, visit instagram.com/japhyriddle
City Monster (Connectix QuickCam test) Japhy Riddle 2024-04-08 | City Monster. Paper cut-outs. Recorded with the Connectix QuickCam (the first consumer webcam) onto an old Macintosh IIci computer. Thanks to @croulie for holding up the city.#quickcam #connectixquickcam #macintosh #macintoshiici #iici #homemovie #monstermovie #monster #city #skyline #papercutout #googlyeyes #artsandcrafts #cameratest #webcam #blackandwhite #retrotech #buildings #system7 #macintoshii #fmv #cute #1994 #1989 #badart #retrocomputing #godzilla #quicktime #dithering #vintagemac
Little Seven Color Paintings (Atari 2600 Art) Japhy Riddle 2024-03-05 | Here is a fun series of pictures I made using “Little Seven Color Paint Program” or “Seven-color PAINT program”. It’s not clear what the official title is. It’s an unfinished homebrew graphics program for the Atari 2600 made in 2005 by John Payson. The program lets the user draw 16x16 block images using six colors plus black. Holding down the Select switch on the console enables color cycling. For some reason, the first two columns order their colors differently from the rest. Normally, it’s not very noticeable, but it becomes very apparent during color cycling. Another odd thing is the two red/orange columns on the sides. I don’t know why they’re there. The blinking cursor can’t be hidden, so for each picture, I tried to put it in a place that made sense. Some of the images were run through a video amplifier with a hue adjustment because I wanted slightly different colors than the normal palette. The blocks were quite a bit taller than they were wide, so I stretched the video to make them closer to squares.The songs were made on an Atari 2600 with “JamLoopy”. You can listen to an album of them at: japhyriddle.bandcamp.com
Branch - Random Pencil Scribbles and Ensoniq ESQ-1 Notes Japhy Riddle 2024-02-01 | Originally I had wanted to use a photograph of a tree for this idea. Everywhere I went, I looked at the trees, but none of them were quite the right shape. Their branch structures were too dense and complicated. Eventually I discovered that a dead jalapeño plant in the backyard had an appropriate structure for my idea. The plant was held up and photographed against the sky.The scribbles were drawn on paper with colored pencils, and ‘multiplied’ onto the photo digitally. The visual pattern was left mostly up to chance: the computer’s random function. Each filled-in area (each “cell”) turns on and off randomly. As the composition progresses, the likelihood of the cells turning on increases.Each cell turning on triggers a different tone. The scale I chose is somewhere between pretty and dissonant. The sounds were made using an old Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer.#branch #ensonicesq1 #random #relaxing #tree #jalapeno #stainedglass #stainedglasswindow #ensoniq #synthesizer #mellow #nature #electronicmusic #sticks #art #sky #randomness #music #calm #animation #stopmotion #coloredpencil #pencil #scribble #magic #handdrawn #outside #experimentalmusic #experimentalart #naturephotography
Sand Dancer Animation Japhy Riddle 2024-01-10 | Sand Dancer. A short stop-motion animation I made for the class I’m teaching through the Dogbotic creative workshop program. The “sand” is actually wheat flour. The dancer is made of sticks and stones.This is technically rotoscoping. I video projected footage of a dancer onto the flour, and matched my literal stick-figure as best I could to the dancer’s body.For each frame I had to turn off the main light, unblock the projector lens, advance the video footage, reposition the sticks with tweezers, block the projector lens again, turn on the main light, and take a photo. Repeat 115 times.For music, I used a kalimba and a viola—two instruments that I can’t really play. The sand sound was actually some quinoa being brushed around. Callie Day recorded it.#sand #dance #stopmotion
Bok Bok Japhy Riddle 2023-12-20 | Bok bok bok bok, bok bok. Bok bok bok?A chicken types a letter. Stop-motion animation with paper cut-outs. Vocals by Dorothy Green (an actual chicken). Made for the animation class I’m teaching as part of the Dogbotic creative workshop program.If you'd like to leave a comment but don't know what to say, please consider just typing "Bok" a number of times. How cool would it be if the comment section were mostly just filled with chicken words.#chicken #stopmotion #typewriter
Useless Magnetic Angular Loop Creating Machine Japhy Riddle 2023-10-30 | A machine I made consisting of a geared-down DC motor turning a thinly cut section of a lint roller causing a couple hundred tiny neodymium magnets to continuously form a varied assortment of polygonal shapes.This thing lives somewhere between high sculptural art and... just plain silliness.#machine #lintroller #neodymiummagnets #useless #sculture
