You must now make the large blocks step in across the tree form. Create a new comp and include a guide layer with a duplicate of your tree form. Set its opacity to 30% so that you can still see it while also seeing anything else you're going to add. Now we're going to add some blocks: To do this, I would use text squares of the appropriate form around the tree, which would then be animated using the Typewriter effect. Make one set of these for left to right blocks exclusively, leaving a space for right to left blocks. Duplicate your "left to right" blocks layer and reduce the x-axis to -100. Colorize the two sets of blocks so you can see what's going on. Adjust the keyframes on the typewriter effect till they arrive at the desired pace.
What I'd like to see is a very basic scanline overlay that draws black horizontal lines over the picture with nothing between them for maximum brightness and with the scanlines adjusted to complete black. I believe this might be accomplished by just eliminating all of the grey pixels from the Wii scanline overlay, however I'm not sure whether totally black scanlines can be obtained via the overlay. I've gotten to the stage where I can alter the overlay, but I still can't obtain transparency—everything I've done results in translucent white rather than complete transparency. Prior to this, I had never ever touched GIMP.
56k alert! a plethora of screenshots According to Wesley Fenlon: Scanlines are analog video's version of catnip. The black lines that run across the screen of an 8- or 16-bit game help soften the sharp pixels of low resolution graphics, but they've also created a visual style that millions of people connect with 2D video games. They are useful as well as sentimental, and they are one of the most identifiable components of earlier games. Click to enlarge... Click to enlarge...
Internally, the Pixels property utilizes the Windows API methods GetPixel and SetPixel to get and set device context color values. The Pixels approach suffers from a performance shortcoming in that you must typically get pixel color values before modifying them, which requires the use of both of the aforementioned Windows API calls. This race is won by the ScanLine property, which offers direct access to the RAM where the bitmap pixel data is kept. Furthermore, direct memory access is only slightly quicker than two Windows API function calls. However, this does not imply that the Pixels property is completely useless and should be avoided in all circumstances. When you just need to change a few pixels (not a large region), for example, Pixels may be adequate. However, do not use it if you want to alter a pixel region.
