Photographic Flipnotes

Since I've been doing a lot of noodling around on the 3DS lately, I of course could not neglect its Flipnote title, Flipnote Studio 3D. This is the 3DS's number one art tool that allows you to make animations. It has a very particular style to it - you can clock a Flipnote from ten miles away - and it is quite sophisticated.

One of its interesting features is that you can take a photo in it, which will be translated into this pretty dithered style. I've seen this used to great effect for backgrounds of drawings, but here I thought, let's just go back to the basics and make a photographic animation. The number one thing to do when you are twelve.

There is an ultimate simplicity to this that feels so right. I don't even need to draw anything. I can just move my 3DS and make stop motion. Classic good fun. Why aren't we all doing this every day?

Also, I find myself impressed with small file sizes more and more these days. Something has taken hold of me and I find myself thinking things like "wow, only 33kb!" - and that, dear reader, is the size of the Super Mario gif at the top of this post. Is that not impressive? Does that not make you smile proudly? 

Thirty-three kilobytes, darling. That's all he is.