STOODERS
What happens when you force a perfect drawing to fail?
DRAWN, CRUSHED INTO 256x256, THEN REBUILT PIXEL BY PIXEL.
Each character starts as a high-resolution master. Then it gets forced into the same pixel space as a Commodore 64 screen. Details disappear, lines break — and the character has to be reconstructed until it becomes readable at its true size.
A huge head, a small body, and that furious, screaming, obnoxious expression that ties the entire collection together. There are no calm Stooders.
256x256 against the Commodore 64’s 320x200. Only 2.4% apart. A deliberate bridge between modern tools and a machine from the ’80s.
THE PROCESS IS PRETTY STRANGE.
It starts with something much larger and eventually gets forced into 65,536 pixels. Then it gets taken apart, moved through code, taken back into human hands and corrected frame by frame, and finally put back together.
Every Stooder begins long before the pixels. The first stage is an almost obsessive visual research process — looking for references everywhere: photography, movies, old video games, manga, toys, advertising, characters, objects, and images lost somewhere on the web. Most of them somehow connected to childhood or teenage years.
Sometimes it starts from a single reference. Other times different elements get combined — collages, redrawn parts, different solutions — until something emerges that can be reinterpreted through the visual language of the Stooders.
BECAUSE WHATEVER THE STARTING POINT IS, IN THE END IT HAS TO BECOME A STOODER.
A huge head, a small stocky body, chibi/deformed proportions, and above all that furious, screaming, almost obnoxious and exaggerated expression that ties the entire collection together.
From the research, a high-resolution master is built. This is where the pose, anatomy, expression, clothes, objects, and all those small elements that tell you who the character is get defined.
THEN COMES THE FUNDAMENTAL STEP: FORCING IT INTO 256x256 PIXELS.
That resolution is not arbitrary. 256x256 gives you 65,536 pixels — remarkably close to the 64,000 pixels of the Commodore 64’s 320x200 high-resolution screen. Only about a 2.4% difference.
The Commodore 64 was a milestone — one of those machines that helped shape a visual imagination. So the entire Stooders universe is built inside almost the same amount of visual space.
256x256 is not simply the final resolution. It is a deliberate bridge between modern tools and the machine that helped shape an imagination as a kid.
Once the high-resolution master enters that 256x256 world, everything changes. What worked at high resolution does not necessarily work anymore. Details disappear, lines merge, elements become unreadable. That is when a process of subtraction and reconstruction begins — cleaning silhouettes, simplifying shapes and colors, recovering details, working on individual pixels until the character becomes readable again at its true size.
AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHERE THE IMAGE TRULY BECOMES A STOODER.
The process does not end with the static image. The character gets broken down into independent parts: head, body, arms, legs, and whenever necessary, eyes, mouth, or other elements.
This is where a Python script comes into play — originally built together with AI (Claude and OpenAI), later reworked by a programmer who works in video games and online casinos.
The script does not create the final animation. It creates its first structure — applying small movements, rotations, and variations to different parts, generating a basic sequence of 9 frames.
BUT THE CODE DOES NOT DECIDE THE FINAL ANIMATION. THOSE NINE FRAMES ARE ONLY RAW MATERIAL.
They get brought back into Photoshop and worked on one by one. An arm gets cut out and moved higher. The angle of a leg changes. The head position shifts. Sections get reconstructed, pixels copied or redrawn, eyes or mouth modified.
If a movement mathematically generated by the script does not work visually, it gets broken apart and rebuilt manually. A constant back-and-forth between code and hand. Python generates a structure. It gets modified, disrupted — imperfections introduced to make it less mathematical.
Only then do those nine frames make their way into After Effects. Here the work is mainly on timing, rhythm, pauses, and frame sequencing.
NOT LOOKING FOR THE PERFECT SMOOTHNESS OF TRADITIONAL ANIMATION. QUITE THE OPPOSITE.
The goal is that slight imperfection, that snap, that controlled stiffness that makes the movement feel almost like digital stop motion.
So in the end, the pipeline is: research → drawing → high-res master → 256x256 → pixel cleanup → breakdown → Python → 9 frames → Photoshop → After Effects → final loop.
It starts with something much larger, gets forced into 65,536 pixels, taken apart, moved through code, taken back into human hands and corrected frame by frame, and finally put back together.
Maybe that is the contradiction at the heart of the Stooders: using modern tools, code, AI and post-production to create something that, in the end, feels like it could have come from a computer sitting in a bedroom in the 80s. And in a strange way, by choosing those 256x256 pixels, it almost does.