The ASCII Horse In Motion

For practice, I decided to try my hand at creating an animated text-art version of Muybridge’s running horse photos. This is the end result.

The ASCII art was hand placed in Monodraw, a great Mac app for creating text art. The first thing I often do when creating ASCII art is to pick a specific part of the image that is important to me, then use that component to determine the scale of the finished piece. In this case, I wanted the rider’s head to be a “O” shape. Once I had that figured out, I knew how large everything else would be in relation. I eyeballed the first photo for reference to create my initial frame, then just copied that text and made changes to it for each following frame.

Here is the original work: