The process he eventually settled on started with Mechner using a video camera to record his brother running and jumping in a parking lot across from their high school. Once he found a take that worked, the video was played back on a TV in a dark room and the screen was photographed with a 35-millimeter film camera, frame by frame, creating roughly 35 photos of his brother in action. Mechner then traced over each photograph with a black marker and white correction fluid to create a high-contrast black and white silhouette of each pose, and then used a photocopier to assemble all of them onto a single sheet of paper that was scanned into an Apple II using a special capture card.
With the poses all digitized, Mechner then painstakingly cut them all out, pixel by pixel, and used a special graphics tool to assemble them into frame animations.
Kinda:
That’s honestly really cool!