Mike Matei

My TMNT Mario Paint Animation, A Retrospective

As for other limitations, lines need to be drawn extremely slowly in Mario Paint, because moving the cursor too fast will result in dotted lines streaking across the screen. Not to mention every pen stroke overwrites the color underneath, as there is no layering functionality, so trying to build colored shapes with an outline requires a bit of planning in advance. In Mario Paint, I typically lay down color blobs and then add black outlines around them as the very last step, which is backwards from the way most people draw.

This is three lines drawn in Mario Paint at different speeds of strokes with the mouse.

The limitation of Mario Paint that's probably the most regrettable is the dismal color selection. There are only 15 solid colors, and 15 extra colors which are the basic colors combined in various ways in a pixel checkerboard pattern.

Unfortunately, an artist working within the restrictions of Mario Paint will have to use these extra colors sometimes, for better or worse. Outside of these 30, there's also several pages of stuff that I rarely find a use for at all.

This is due to the limitations of the hardware of the SNES. I'm not a programmer and I wasn't able to find any detailed information on how Mario Paint's code works, but here's my best guess of what's going on: The canvas area of Mario Paint is 248×168 pixels, which means it's made up of 8×8 tiles, 31 horizontal and 21 vertical. The SNES has 16 colors to work with in each 8×8 tile, which means Mario Paint is using the maximum amount of colors the console can support (I'm guessing that one color has to be left unused for transparency, possibly to allow the cursor to hover over the drawing area). Also, the SNES can only display 34 of these tiles per horizontal row, so there's 31 tiles for the canvas, 2 tiles for the border around the screen, and 1 left over that allows for the cursor.

Which means, as much as I lament the poor color choices, I can't blame the creators of Mario Paint. They squeezed as much functionality out of Mario Paint as the hardware allowed. The checkerboard colors and blob patterns was the only way to extend the colors available. (By the way, if you're knowledgeable about how Mario Paint or the SNES hardware works and anything I said is incorrect, let me know and I'll edit this article with the correct information and give you credit).

The color limitations also played a big part in why I chose the TMNT opening. Mario Paint offers two solid shades of green, which would allow me to add shadows to the Turtles' skin.

There's also an undo history of exactly one action, which is offered to you by the dog icon. Saving and loading is limited and slow, the flood fill tool is slow (although it can be cancelled in the middle to partially fill things), the animation function is limited to 4 drawable frames... I could go on and on about the limitations of Mario Paint, but I think you get the point.

So, as I just mentioned, Mario Paint has a pretty limited animation suite, so I used modern capture technology to simply capture frames when I completed them, and then edit them together later in video editing software. This could have been done in 1992 as well. I have friends who would use their VCR to record Mario Paint onto VHS and string them together to make elaborate animation projects, as well as other Nintendo art tools such as the GameBoy Camera placed into a Super Game Boy. VCRs connected to a camcorder could also be used to do stop motion animation with clay or toys, and even film individual frames of drawings to make animations.

This process was super nerve wracking, because each completed frame had to be discarded from existence entirely once I was done grabbing them. At least data storage is easy nowadays and I didn't have to worry about someone in the house overwriting my animation in order to record an episode of Roseanne from the TV.

So, we come back to the concessions I talked about at the beginning. The original animated sequence for the TMNT show totals up to about 1200 individual frames of animation. So if I averaged about an hour per frame drawing in Mario Paint, and I worked 8 hours a day, that would mean I would reasonably get 8 frames done per day. Which means it would take 150 days of nonstop work to get the animation done, which would be okay if I didn't also have a full time job and a social life that needs to be taken care of as well.

My animation ended up with about 420 frames total, and took me 6 months. So doing 1200 frames would have taken a year and a half, and who knows how much I would slow down from fatigue after a project that long. There were a couple times I could get a break, such as some frames just being a single solid color (such as lightning flashes), and I reused the swirling TMNT logo from the beginning for the end.

I mentioned earlier that Mario Paint doesn't offer any layer functionality, so this is a huge problem when animating moving characters over a background. As you can see in the above example, the background is constantly being destroyed by the turtles moving across the screen, and that destroyed information has to be rebulit when the portion of the background comes back into view.

Surprisingly, the shots you would think would be more difficult to do, such as Donatello flying around the city and the background moving around really fast, are about the same difficulty as the shot you see above, because of the lack of background layers. When the background is moving so quickly, redrawing the entire frame isn't that much worse.

Another issue came from the fact that I wasn't going to use all 1200 frames from the original animation, so I had to pick and choose which frames to use. I was referring to a television off to the side drawing these individual frames, and I tried to pick out individual frames that would convey the most movement. This resulted in a bit of a discontinuity in the framerate, which had to be corrected manually when it came time to edit. This is why you see the framerate fluctuate often during the entire sequence. This is regrettable but... I dunno. Nobody has really complained about it, and if they did I'd just shrug and say Mario Paint isn't the optimal tool to create animation. I did the best I could, you know?

Recreating an animation sequence in Mario Paint is so ridiculously transformative that it easily meets the requirements for Fair Use, so in order to keep my video from getting taken down, I was going to need a cover version of the music instead of using the original audio. Luckily I was able to get a great one by , that was tailored to match the timing of the video I animated. After that was done, it just needed some editing and it was completed.

So there you have it. How do I feel about this animation more than a year later? I'm glad I did it because it's something nobody had ever done before. Doing something this elaborate with the drawing section of the game. Sure a lot of people have done a lot with the music portion, and there is a very small limit to what you can do with the in-game animation tool. But to animate something like this with the basic drawing tool, I'd say I did the most elaborate thing anyone ever attempted. If there's anything else out there even close to as time consuming, I'd love to see it.

I think it was a really good personal exercise for me in diligence and determination. I'm glad that I managed to finish it. Starting a project like this and then abandoning it halfway would have been a gnawing regret I would have had to carry for the rest of my life. The end result wasn't perfect, but it's more important to me that I finished it.

Source by: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/