Trench Vibes with Gastón Pacheco

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Remember those hologram rulers from back when we were kids? Or ‘lenticular rulers’, as science calls them.

Entire stories and animated sequences in just a few inches. Have you thought about those editing skills?

It aches to see such a fine, exquisite concept fall into obscurity so soon.

So, to honor those glorious days, we asked the king of fine, exquisite concepts himself, Gastón Pacheco, to design a lenticular ruler we'd love to have.

And he came up with this.

Gastón proposed a whole deep-life concept, and we totally rolled with it, obviously.

In those classic rulers, the animation was created with only 2 frames—or 3 in the thicker ones—that ping-ponged as you tilted the ruler back and forth.

*cheating.exe

We set out to work with 4 frames that wouldn't ping-pong: instead, they’d keep playing regardless of the hand in motion.

Animating these loops in a way that overlaps and motion arcs read well in 4 frames was quite a challenge. Especially because the playback time wouldn't be 4 frames constant.

Then, we animated the ruler in After Effects, pre-composing the characters inside.

Finally, the hands were animated on top of the ruler reference.