Motion ASCII guide

Overview

Motion ASCII redraws a video as moving letters and symbols, live, in your browser.

Flowing bands of pink, violet and gold drawn in small text characters on black
The moving test pattern with the Classic set in Color ink at 80 columns. The picture is one moment; on the page it keeps moving.

It is ASCII art that moves. A dark spot gets a sparse character, such as a dot; a bright spot gets a dense one, such as @.

That ordered row of characters, from empty to dense, is a luminance ramp. Every character set in the tool is one ramp, and each starts with a blank space for the darkest parts.

Each frame is shrunk to a grid of cells, a few hundred across at most. The tool measures the luminance of every cell, turns it with the contrast, brightness and gamma sliders, and prints the matching character from the ramp. That is video to glyphs.

The characters take the colour of the video under them, or one colour of your choice. A soft glow can sit behind them, and a glass loupe magnifies the grid wherever you point.

Open Motion ASCII Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need, your first moving picture, and how to save it.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree looks from the test pattern and the settings behind them.
  4. Keep your workThe PNG frame and the video.
  5. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

Until you choose a video, a moving test pattern of flowing colour keeps the grid busy. Every picture in this guide is made from that pattern.

It runs in your browser on a 2D canvas; it needs no WebGL. The video never leaves your device. A mouse, a trackpad, a pen and a finger all work.