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ScrAM - The Scroll Art Museum

Skulls and Hearts

Al Sweigart, 2024. A parallax experiment with scroll art with skulls and hearts.

The use of parallax in this piece was discovered by accident. Al Sweigart created Skulls and Hearts as a sequence for the Forbidden Zone music video, but noticed that the hearts in the foreground seemed to move faster than the skulls in the background. This is impossible; the output of all scroll art is just one stream. However, the illusion of parallax was achieved because the repeating skull pattern is eight lines in height, but by moving the animation nine lines at a time, the skulls appear to move only one line up. Meanwhile, the hearts do not repeat and therefore do look like they move up nine lines at a time.

The difference makes the parallax effect appear. It was a serendipitous discovery that renewed Sweigart's interest in testing the limits of what is possible within the tight constraints of scroll art.

The skull ASCII art is a modification of the one originally used in the Shining scroll art. This design was originally created for Project 41 - Lucky Stars in The Big Book of Small Python Projects , a clone of the game Zombie Dice .

Python source code

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