ASCII Animation Workbench
Builds an animation of character grids from a video, a GIF, a frame-by-frame editor, moving text or a procedural effect, and exports plain frames, ANSI, asciicast v2, an animated GIF and a self-contained HTML player.
This is a workbench rather than a converter. The document is a sequence of character grids with a delay on each, and there are four ways to fill it — a video or GIF, drawing the frames yourself with the previous one showing through, moving a banner around, or one of the procedural effects — and four ways to get it out, including a real animated GIF and a single HTML file that plays it with no network at all.
Andy Sloane’s donut.c (2006): a z-buffered torus shaded by the surface normal against a fixed light.
The same seed always gives the same frames, so a result can be reproduced and re-exported identically.
Frame 1 of 1
1 frame, 0.1 s, about 7.5 kB in memory
Export
How to use it
Watch the frame budget, not the file size
Everything here costs frames times grid cells, and the page prints how many frames fit at the width you have chosen. Widening the output from 80 to 160 characters quarters the number of frames you can hold. The cap exists because the alternative is a phone tab being killed with no message at all.
Set the delays before you export
Each frame carries its own delay and every exporter reads it, so what you see in the preview is what the GIF and the asciicast will do. Set one frame and press “apply to every frame” for a constant rate, or leave individual frames longer to hold on a pose.
Choose the export by where it is going
asciicast v2 for asciinema and for anyone who will play it in a terminal. GIF for a chat window or a README. The HTML player for an embed — it is one file with the frames inside it and no CDN. Plain text frames if something else is going to read them.
Common questions
What is asciicast v2 and why not just a GIF?
It is the format asciinema records terminals in — JSON lines, a header object then one [time, "o", data] array per frame — and it stays *text*, so it is a few kilobytes where the GIF is a few megabytes, and the viewer can select and copy what is on screen. Implemented here from the published spec. A GIF is the right answer when the destination cannot play a terminal recording, which is most places.
The procedural effects — did you write those?
The code, yes; the techniques are older and are credited on the page. The spinning torus is Andy Sloane’s donut.c method — a z-buffer so the near surface wins, and the surface normal dotted with a fixed light to index the ramp — and the fire is the demoscene effect Fabien Sanglard documented. Plasma, the rain and the sine scroller are folklore with no single author, and are named as such. Every effect is a pure function of the frame number and the seed, so the same seed always gives the same animation.
Can I stop a long conversion?
Yes, and it actually stops. The conversion runs in a worker that checks between frames, so cancelling ends the work rather than hiding the result — which matters on a phone, where the difference is another minute of the fan running.
Feed it from
Random Picker
Picks one or several entries from a pasted list, with weights and an optional spinning wheel.
Bingo Card Generator
Builds printable bingo cards from a word list or number range, each card shuffled differently.
Tier List Maker
Drags images or labels into S–F rows and exports the finished board as an image.
ASCII Text Art
Renders text as large ASCII letters through a real FIGfont renderer, with two bundled fonts and a slot for a .flf of your own.
Next
These accept what this tool produces, so the result can go straight in.
Image to ASCII
Converts a picture into ASCII or ANSI-coloured characters at a chosen width and character set.
Braille Art
Turns a photograph into Unicode braille cells — 2 × 4 dots per character, eight times the resolution of a brightness ramp — with a choice of dithering.
Text Art to Image
Renders any monospaced text art as a PNG or SVG with a chosen font, cell size, colour, background and optional transparency, so it survives being posted where monospace is not preserved.
Video to GIF
Turns a clip into an animated GIF or WebP with frame rate, size and palette controls.
Daily Fortune by Zodiac Animal & Star Sign
Composes one day’s reading for a zodiac animal or star sign from the day’s own 일진 and the traditional temperament of the sign. Seeded from the date, so it is the same all day and refreshing does not reroll it.
Zodiac Compatibility (궁합)
Two birth dates give two animal signs and two day stems. Reports the exact relation between them — 삼합, 육합, 충, 원진, 형, 파, 해 — and the five-element relation of the day stems, each with the traditional verdict.