ASCII Motion

Turn video and GIFs into ASCII animation

ASCII Motion is a free, browser-based ASCII art generator for moving images. It reads an animated GIF or a short video frame by frame and redraws every frame out of typed characters, halftone dots or pixel blocks, then gives it back as an animated GIF, an MP4, a scalable SVG, or a snippet of HTML you can paste into a page.

Nothing is uploaded. The whole conversion runs on your own machine, so there is no account to make, no watermark on the result and no queue to wait in.

How ASCII animation works

Turning a video into text art is really one small measurement repeated a few thousand times a second. Every frame goes through the same three steps:

1. The frame is measured on a grid. Each frame is scaled down to a grid between 16 and 140 columns wide, and the tool measures how much ink sits in every cell. Ink can be read as darkness, as lightness — right for a glowing subject on a dark background — or as distance from the background colour, which is what separates a subject from a flat backdrop.
2. Each cell is flattened to a tone. The raw value is stretched between a black point and a contrast curve, then snapped to between two and six tonal steps. Fewer steps give the hard, posterised look of an old LCD; more steps keep a smooth gradient.
3. The tone chooses a mark. In ASCII mode the tone picks a character from a ramp that runs light to dark, so . lands in the highlights and @ in the shadows. In dot mode it sets the dot's colour, its size, or both — which is exactly how a printed halftone carries shading.

Play those frames back in order and the characters appear to move, because each one is re-chosen from scratch every frame. That flicker across the character ramp is what makes ASCII animation read as motion rather than as a slideshow of text.

How to make an ASCII animation

1. Upload a file — drag & drop or choose an animated GIF, MP4, WEBM or MOV.
2. Pick a preset and style — switch between ASCII, dots, squares, diamonds and crosses, then fine-tune the grid, character set, speed, colour and contrast.
3. Download — export an animated GIF, an MP4 or a scalable SVG, or copy the HTML embed straight into your own page.

Five ways to draw each frame

• ASCII — every cell becomes a monospaced character from a light-to-dark ramp. Eight character sets are built in, from a classic .:-=+*#%@ ramp to block shading, bar graphs, hatching and pure binary, and you can type your own.
• Dot — the classic halftone screen, where dot size grows with darkness for smooth tonal range.
• Square — solid blocks, for a pixel-art or dot-matrix display look.
• Diamond — rotated squares, a coarser and more crystalline print grain.
• Cross — plus-shaped marks, closer to a stitch or a pen-plotter stroke.

Eight presets set all of it at once: Newsprint for a true print halftone, ASCII acid and Amber CRT for terminal-green and phosphor-amber screens, Nokia for a two-tone LCD, Riso pink for a duplicator print, and three ASCII looks in white, blue and black.

Why use this ASCII animation generator

• Free, with no sign-up and no watermark on your exports.
• Private by design — your file never leaves your browser.
• Four export formats, including animated SVG that stays sharp at any size and a self-contained HTML embed with no dependencies.
• Full control over grid, character set, speed, colour and contrast, rather than a single fixed filter.
• Works on GIFs and video alike, so you can convert a screen recording as easily as a reaction loop.

Frequently asked questions