Option 7: palette cycling. Every pixel was drawn once and never changes again. All motion comes from rotating and re-tinting colours in a 100-entry palette, shown live in the strip below the scene.

**Nothing is redrawn.**
The scene is a grid of numbers (palette indices) built once. Each frame changes only what colour each number means.

**Watch the strip under the scene.**
It's the live palette. Coloured bands slide along it, and the waterfall, lake, fire and rim scanner move in step.

**Tick "Show index map."**
You see the scene as raw numbers in false colour. The waterfall is diagonal stripes of 8 indices. The fire is stacked bands.

**Six kinds of motion, all from the palette:**
**The blink is three nested shapes, not three frames.**
Index 77 is the closed slit, 78 the half-open eye, 79 the full eye. Blinking just recolours 79, then 78, back to body white.

**The sun and moon never move or disappear.**
They're always there. Their palette entries fade into the sky colour when it's the "wrong" time of day.

**Time of day is 4 palette keyframes.**
Dawn, day, sunset and night are blended. Same pixels, four moods. Mark Ferrari's classic scenes for Living Worlds used this idea.

**The reflection uses 4 dim "echo" indices.**
Every third row is left as lake ripple, which breaks up the reflection like moving water.

**"Blend steps" is the modern upgrade.**
1980s hardware rotated colours in hard jumps. Untick it to see the stepped, chunkier original look.

**Why it mattered:**
on 1980s machines, rewriting a full screen of pixels was slow. Rewriting 30 palette entries was almost free. Rich animation cost almost nothing.

**The core idea**
```
index buffer (fixed) palette (changes) screen 32 33 34 35 + 32→white 33→pale 34→blue = stripes 33 34 35 36 rotate by 1 each tick appear to 34 35 36 37 32→blue 33→white ... flow down
```

**Palette layout (100 entries)**
```
0 ─── 15 │16─23│24─27│32─39│40─47│48─55│56──67│68─73│77─79│80─87│88─91│92 93│94─99 sky │stars│hills│fall │lake │fire │rim │body │eyes │rock │reflect│sun/moon│firelit │cycle│ │cycle│cycle│cycle│cycle │ │swap │ │ │fade│tint
```

**Nested blink**
```
state: open half closed 77 slit black black black 78 half black black body 79 full black body body
```

**Critical thinking:**
palette cycling needs careful planning: every moving thing must be designed as index bands in advance. Does that constraint produce better art than free animation, or just different art?

**Lateral thinking:**
stadium card stunts, LED marquees, film leader countdowns and even brand refreshes that change colours but not logos all "animate meaning without moving shapes." Where could you change what something means without redrawing it?

**First principles:**
any image is positions × colours. If only one of those two can change cheaply, what kinds of motion can you express with colour alone, and which can you never express?

- How did Mark Ferrari plan his scenes?
- Can this export as a looping GIF?