Image Perturbation (pt 1)

Check out this GIF…

It comes from a video you can see here. Although the video is funny and reveals a fascinating fun fact about our egg-laying mammalian friend the platypus, the content itself is not terribly important for the following discussion.

What is important is to notice the way that stationary objects (like the platypus’ little hat) in this animation seem to wiggle a little bit despite being stationary.

It looks the way hot air can distort an image by changing the density of the air (and thereby the refractive index) through which you are viewing a scene. More dramatically, like this:

This method of animation is important for making stationary characters and objects appear lifelike. I’ve tried my hand at drawing, with the hope of one day animating things here and there - it’s labor intensive. I imagine for people who are really serious about it, there are tools to add in this distortion. But I wanted to see if I could do it myself. I call the process “image perturbation” and you can see my exploration through that process here.