arthur

An animation suite for turning live-action video into work that reads as hand-authored — flat shapes, a tiny palette, hard edges, motion carried by silhouette, in the idiom of Another World.

It stabilises a face out of a clip, reduces the lip contour to a handful of vertices, derives teeth from image content, lets you decide which frames need their own hand-drawn head, and renders the result as flat indexed fills at 320×200 with no antialiasing.

The constraint is deliberate. 320×200 and an indexed palette are inherited from Animator Pro, where this started, but they are why the output looks right — modern conveniences belong in the workflow, not the output. See docs/design.md.

ClojureScript port

The active port has reached step 7 of the port plan: it plays the synthetic take and can load extracted real footage with mouth, eyes, brows, and pixel-derived teeth. See frontend/README.md for setup and the load frames workflow. The rest of this README describes the older JS prototype, which still runs separately on port 8777.

Run

python3 serve.py                   # from this directory, then open 127.0.0.1:8777

Use serve.py, not python3 -m http.server. The latter sends Last-Modified and browsers cache ES modules on it hard enough that a reload serves a stale js/app.js against a fresh index.html — new knobs appear in the markup, nothing wires them, no error is raised, and the symptom reads as "the feature does not work". serve.py is the same server with no-store.

Static files and ES modules — no build step, no dependencies beyond MediaPipe's wasm, which is fetched from a CDN on first use.

Synthetic take needs no video and exercises everything below detection.

For real footage:

./extract.sh /path/to/clip.mov      # -> frames/*.png, audio.wav, manifest.json

then Load frames. MediaPipe's wasm is fetched from jsdelivr on first use; face_landmarker.task is local.

Frames are pre-extracted rather than decoded in the page because browser video seeking is approximate and requestVideoFrameCallback only delivers frames at playback speed — neither gives a deterministic per-frame pass.

manifest.json records the source rate. The extractor keeps every source frame; the page reads that rate because a guessed fps desynchronises audio from picture. Choosing a lower picture rate happens after analysis.

Picture fps decides how often the finished roto gets a new pose. Analyze all source frames, then sample those frozen poses at 12, 24 or the source rate while keeping the original duration and audio. Exposure can hold a drawing across more than one picture slot. The tracing editor chooses source frames for cel references separately. Shared timing is the useful default for mouth, eyes, teeth and plate so their changes read as one performance.

Audio is the playback clock: frame = floor(audio.currentTime * fps). A slow render loop therefore drops frames instead of drifting, and ½x / ¼x work by setting playbackRate with the picture following for free.

Shooting for it

Near-frontal, good light, consistent scale, head reasonably still. Hold a neutral closed mouth for a second at the top of the take: that frame is picked automatically as the neutral and drives calibration and the placeholder plate.

Out-of-plane head rotation cannot be stabilised away by a 2D similarity transform — the residual readout rises when it happens. The pipeline's answer is hand-drawn head plates, which this tool does not yet do.

Knobs

Knob	What it does
vertices	Lip vertex budget. The reduction past what the footage supports is the style.
exposure	How often the picture changes: on 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s. Rip dense, choose timing here.
mouth lead ±f	Shifts the performance tracks earlier against the audio and the head. [ ].
contour avg ±f	Radius in frames. 0 off, 1 = ±1. Removes per-frame landmark jitter.
anchor avg ±f	Radius on the four similarity parameters. Smooths the transform.
closed-mouth cut	Aperture below which the mouth interior is emitted as hidden.
suggest tolerance	Max head movement before a new plate drawing is required. Affects Suggest only.

Teeth

MediaPipe has no landmarks inside the lips: the inner ring bounds the cavity and everything within it is just pixels. So teeth come from the image.

The hazard is vertex correspondence — a traced contour reorders between frames and boils. The way out for a blob specifically is radial sampling: march outward from the blob's centroid along N fixed directions and take the last pixel inside. Vertex k is then always "the extent in direction k", so correspondence holds by construction, the vertex count is fixed, and temporal smoothing is well defined with no reordering possible. It also produces a star-shaped reduction, which is what flat blocks of colour want.

The teeth measurement panel shows exactly what is sampled: region dimmed, kept pixels green, extracted contour amber. Tune against that, not the numbers.

Knob	What it does
teeth contrast	Gate on the separation between the cavity's dark and bright class means. Otsu always returns some threshold, so this is what stops it inventing teeth in a dark mouth.
cavity erode	Pulls the sampled region in from the lip edge — MediaPipe's inner lip landmarks sit slightly outside the real opening, and lips are bright.
blob grow/erode	Resizes the found blob. An open pass always runs first to despeckle.
tongue reject	Drops pixels red relative to their own brightness. Teeth are near-neutral; tongue is not.
prefer upper	Biases component choice toward the top of the cavity. Area alone picks the tongue when the mouth is wide.
teeth vertices	Radial sample count.
teeth avg ±f	Temporal average over the contour.
teeth dwell	Frames a presence change must persist before it takes effect.

Tongue as its own part would work the same way, gated on redness instead of brightness and biased low rather than high. Not implemented: it is not visible in the test footage, which reads as a dark cavity with a bright upper-teeth band.

Eyes

Three parts per eye, stacked the way the mouth is: a dark lash ring, the sclera inside it, and the iris inside that, with a square pupil in the iris. The dark ring outside a pale interior is what makes a flat shape read as an opening rather than a blob, and it is why a blink costs nothing — when the lid shuts, the traced ring goes flat and the lash line collapses to a lens, which is a closed eye, drawn correctly, for free.

The lids are a feature, rotoscoped like the mouth: head-local, a key on every frame, the same contour avg knob. They track the face, because the face is what they are attached to.

The iris is a primitive — a disc at a quantised position — and that is where the stylisation is.

Line of sight

Gaze is the iris centre relative to the midpoint of the eye's two corners, in units of corner distance. Both corners are in RIGID, which is the point: the origin and the scale are built only from landmarks that do not move under performance. Measure against the lid ring's centroid instead and every blink drags that centroid down and fakes a glance at the floor, on exactly the frames where the eye is most conspicuous.

Both eyes share one gaze. At 320×200 an iris is a handful of pixels and its centre comes from five landmarks on an eye twenty pixels wide, so the difference between the two measurements is noise, not vergence — and independent per-eye noise reads as wall-eyed immediately, which is the most expensive artefact on a face. Openness stays per-eye, so a wink survives.

Then the gaze is quantised to a pixel grid with a dwell, which is not a stylisation imposed on the truth: real eyes move in saccades, holding a fixation and then jumping. The smooth drift left in the measurement is tracker noise plus head-compensation error, so snapping to a grid and requiring a dwell removes the noise and recovers the saccade in one operation. The readout reports how many distinct cells the iris ever occupies — three or four is a character who looks at things, forty is an unquantised iris sliding around.

The iris is drawn at the socket read back off the already-smoothed, already- subsampled lid ring — slots 0 and 8 of a 16-slot ring are the corners, and subsampling to any even budget keeps them at output indices 0 and n/2. So the iris is placed in the frame of the exact polygon it sits inside and cannot drift relative to its own eye. Size is authored from the take's mean eye width, not remeasured per frame: a radius that breathes by a fraction of a pixel flickers a pixel on and off around the whole silhouette.

The iris is stencilled to the sclera and the pupil to the iris — the indexed buffer is its own clip mask, the way Animator Pro would do it. So the lid crops the iris at extreme gaze automatically, and nothing needs to clamp the gaze, which would flatten the performance at exactly the extremes that carry it.

Blinking

Openness is the lid gap over the corner distance — normalised, so one threshold carries across takes and faces. It gets hysteresis and a dwell like the teeth, plus one knob the teeth do not have: blink hold. A blink is 100–150ms, which is one frame at 12fps, and a single frame of closed eye reads as a dropped frame rather than as a blink. Animators draw a blink over two or three drawings for that reason, so once the eye shuts it stays shut for hold frames.

The pupil is a square

At this size a pupil is three pixels across, and a circle of radius 1.5 is not a circle — it is a plus sign with the corners gnawed off, and it changes shape as it moves. A square that size is a deliberate mark that stays the same mark wherever it lands. It is drawn from a rounded centre shared with the iris, so it is exactly its nominal size on every frame instead of spilling to the next pixel on some and not others.

Which iris is which

The refined mesh appends ten iris points, five per eye, and MediaPipe's own left/right naming is viewer-relative in some places and subject-relative in others. Getting it backwards swaps the irises, which looks almost right — each eye still has a disc roughly where it belongs — so it survives an eyeball and then reads as a subtly wall-eyed character forever. The pairing is therefore resolved from the geometry, by voting each block's distance to each eye's corner midpoint across every frame, and the selftest feeds it a track built the other way round to prove it actually looks.

Knob	What it does
eye vertices	Lid ring vertex budget, off a 16-slot ring.
lash line	How far the dark ring sits outside the lid, in pixels.
blink cut	Openness below which the eye is shut. Normalised by corner distance.
blink hold	Minimum frames a blink stays on screen. A one-frame blink is a dropout.
blink dwell	Frames a change must persist. Usually 0 — unlike the teeth, a real blink is one frame.
gaze gain	Exaggerates or damps the throw. Measured excursion is small; a character usually wants more.
gaze step	The pixel grid the iris snaps to. 0 = off, and then dwell does nothing either.
gaze dwell	How long a new cell must hold before it takes. Together with step, this is what makes saccades.
iris size	Diameter as a percentage of eye width.
pupil	Square pupil in whole pixels. 0 = off.

Brows

A brow at 320×200 is about fourteen pixels wide and three tall. Its shape carries almost nothing at that size; its height above the eye carries the expression, and a brow raise is the most legible beat on a face. So the ring is traced and the height is quantised — the same split the eyes got, where the lid is a traced feature and the iris a quantised primitive.

The decomposition matters. The traced ring already contains the real height, so adding a quantised raise on top would move the brow twice. Instead the height is measured out of the ring, quantised, and put back: the shape that renders is his, at a height that snaps between a few levels and holds.

Height is measured at both ends, not as one number, because raise and tilt are different expressions out of one mechanism — both ends up is surprise, inner up alone is worry, inner down is anger. They share a dwell, so the brow hits its pose in one frame instead of crawling into it with one end arriving first.

It is measured against the eye's corner midpoint, never its lid — the same trap the gaze origin has, and worth avoiding twice: brows and lids move together constantly, so a brow that jumped on every blink would read as a tic. The rest pose comes from the take median, not the neutral frame, for the same reason gaze does: that frame is chosen by minimum mouth aperture and says nothing whatever about the brows.

Two correspondences are resolved from geometry rather than declared: which ring is which brow, and which end of a ring is the outer one. The second matters more — get it backwards and the tilt mirrors, so worry renders as its own opposite, which reads as a directed performance choice and would never be questioned. Which edge of the brow is the upper one is deliberately left unresolved: it traverses the same ring the other way round, an even-odd fill has no winding, and the two ends still land on fixed slots either way.

Knob	What it does
brow vertices	Ring vertex budget, off a 10-slot ring.
brow weight	Thickens the ring outward. It needs it at three pixels tall.
brow raise gain	Exaggerates or damps the raise.
brow step	The pixel grid the height snaps to. 0 = off.
brow dwell	How long a new height must hold. Shared across both ends.

The plate is reference, not art

The plate layer has several representations because its job changes. Cycle with B:

Mode	For
photo dim / photo	Drawing over. The source frame, stabilised.
posterized	The footage quantised into the ramp — a look test asked of the source rather than of a drawing.
oval	A flat stand-in, to judge the mouth against something.
oval + photo	Checking the stand-in against the real head.
none	Mouth alone.

Photo modes are registered: the frame is mapped into raster space through the same transform chain the contours go through, so the head sits still and a drawing traced from it is already aligned to the mouth. An unregistered underlay would be decorative.

MediaPipe's face oval is the face boundary — it cuts at the hairline and excludes hair, ears, jaw underside and neck — so as a head silhouette it is an egg by construction, and no landmark precision fixes that. Hence the photo.

Save frame 4x writes the current registered composite as a 1280×800 PNG to draw on.

Paint — background cels

A sketch. It exists to test whether the aesthetic holds when a human draws the background instead of the tracker deriving it, and it is meant to be replaced by a real paint surface with onion skin and undo. It is one dependency- free module, js/paint.js, so throwing it away is a delete rather than surgery.

Cels are drawn on the frames that get their own drawing and hold until the next one — the same rule the plate follows, and literally the same lookup. You can scrub anywhere and keep drawing on the cel you can see; the header says which one you are editing and how far it holds.

• pen — click to place vertices, click the green box on the first one (or Enter / double-click) to close.
• edit — click a shape to select, drag a vertex or the whole shape, Shift-click an edge to insert a vertex, Alt-click one to remove it, Del to delete the layer.
• Layers stack Photoshop-style, front at the top, with per-layer colour, show/hide and reorder.
• Copy previous brings the last drawing forward onto this frame. It means the nearest earlier enabled frame that actually has a drawing, skipping the empty ones — every frame is enabled until you thin the strip out, so the naive rule resolved to f-1 and it looked like it only ever copied the frame to the left. Drag a frame from the strip onto the canvas to seed from any other frame instead. Both deep-copy; the two cels never share point arrays.
• Frames carrying a drawing are marked ▣ in the strip, so you can see the rhythm rather than having to remember it.

Two rules are enforced rather than left to discipline. Colours are palette indices, so you cannot pick one that is not in the ramp — sampling colour from the source is the one move docs/design.md says is irrecoverable. And vertices snap to the 320×200 grid, because on a hard-edged indexed rasteriser a shape nudged by 0.4px moves an edge by a whole pixel or not at all depending on where it lands, which shimmers instead of holding.

Drawings autosave to localStorage per take name. They are the only thing in the tool a person made by hand; everything else regenerates. They are not in the .take export yet.

Two kinds of sparseness

Sparseness has two unrelated causes, and conflating them was the original design error here. Aesthetic sparseness is chosen from the full analyzed source track at rendering time. Labour sparseness is a human drawing each cel and selecting which source frames to use as tracing references.

Aesthetic sparseness is the picture fps control, with exposure available for longer holds. Both happen after analysis, so auditioning 12 against 24 needs no re-extraction or re-detection.

So the mouth keeps every frame: it is traced, and therefore free. In limited animation lip sync is routinely the densest element, on 1s, while heads hold on 2s and 3s.

The frame strip is the editing surface for the other half: which frames need their own plate drawing. Everything starts kept; delete what you don't want. Suggest runs error-tolerance decimation over head pose as a starting point, then you hand-correct.

Mouth lead is not a correction for a bug. A centred moving average has no phase lag, so smoothing does not delay anything — but it blurs onsets, and the visually salient moment of a mouth opening moves later even though the mean does not. Animators also draw mouth shapes one or two frames ahead of the sound as standard practice. Only the performance tracks shift; the head stays with the audio, since it is the mouth that should anticipate. The lead is baked into the exported take, so the renderer never needs to know about it.

contour avg is a deliberate, bounded exception to "never smooth the contour" in docs/design.md. That rule held while keys were sparse, because sampling at velocity minima rejected detector noise for free. With a key on every frame it does not, so a radius shorter than the shortest articulation worth keeping is justified — at 12fps, articulation spans 3–6 frames and detector noise is per-frame, so ±1 separates them and ±3 starts eating speech.

Tests

chromium --headless --virtual-time-budget=8000 --dump-dom \
  http://127.0.0.1:8777/selftest.html | grep -oE '(PASS|FAIL) [0-9/]+'

Or open selftest.html. 105 assertions over the stages below detection, plus a wiring cross-check: every el('id') in app.js must exist in index.html. A knob wired in one but not the other throws during wiring, which aborts the rest of the module and leaves a blank page — a symptom that points nowhere near its cause, and which has happened twice.

The ring-simplicity check is the load-bearing one. Because hold parts cut between poses instead of interpolating, a ring whose vertex order is wrong self-intersects and renders as blocks meeting at corners — and it is invisible at odd verts/2 and obvious at even, so it needs an assertion rather than an eyeball.

Not done yet

Hand-drawn head plates and per-plate mouth slots (the strip decides which frames need one, but you cannot yet supply the drawing); real performer→character calibration (currently identity, fitting the face oval to the canvas); the override layer; anything on the Animator Pro side. The plate is a face-oval polygon per kept frame — it exists so the mouth has a face to read against, not to look good.