Apr 26, 2013

David O'Reilly talks about the glitch in the "Adventure Time" episode.

Rhizome.org posted a great interview with David OReilly about his recent "Adventure Time" episode "A Glitch is a Glitch" and the difficulties of creating a convincing stylistic glitch.

"In general, creating stylistic glitches is easy compared to creating good character animation. But mixing the two is very difficult. One of the hardest things to do was to corrupt the scene near the end of the entire broadcast and overlay the previous clips to give Finn & Jake an idea (i.e., using the glitch as a kind of thought bubble). It was easy to storyboard the idea, but a lot of work to make it work properly: ...... Everything was generated from 'real' glitches, but you could also say it was all fake because everything was run through synthesis software and controlled in some sort of way. The glitches had to start locally, inside objects, and spread out until they became part of the scene itself. The localization was done by generating a large number of sprites that moved random pixels outward to create the colorful flourishes one associates with video compression. A good deal of control was exercised, with masses of glitches moving around the scene. Once the scene was fully animated and rendered, the global full-frame glitching was complete. JPEG corruption was added to the final fight scene.