I caught a Pikachu in my Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 Pokéball and so can you :D
If you didn’t have a stroke trying to make sense of the title, this one’s for you! This article is quite light on AI content compared to usual, but I was going through some stuff and Pokémon still puts a smile on my face 23+ years down the road.
I know delayed gratification isn’t a thing anymore thanks to social media, so here’s the download link to the free Z Flip theme for those who aren’t interested in the how. Otherwise, do keep reading :)
If you, like me, are also disappointed to keep missing out on the official Pokémon editions of the Samsung Z Flip phones, do I have a cool idea for you!
Cover screen video
I started out with this free wallpaper (free for non-commercial use!) and cropped it to the default cover screen size: 260x512 pixels.
I could have left it as a static image, but I wanted to make it so that it seems as if Pikachu is actually living and doing his own thing inside our ‘Flipéball’. So to create the blinking animation, I created a new frame using GIMP, which is a completely free and powerful alternative to Photoshop. Sure, this could have just as easily been done in MS Paint or even Powerpoint, but those are workarounds, while GIMP is meant for this kind of image editing and available for free on Windows, Linux and MacOS. I just placed two yellow circles over the eyes, like so:
With these two simple images, if you play them after each other, it tricks your brain into perceiving this as a blinking animation, no? So the next step was to turn the two images into an animation. There are several free video editing tools out there. OpenShot and KDenLive are the two named most often. After having used both over time, I’ve slightly preferred OpenShot, because it crashed less often on my system. However, I noticed that Blender was also mentioned on listicles with free video editing software.
Before then, I only knew Blender from being a powerful and the default rendering tool to create 3D assets, animations and VFX. Turns out, you can do most video editing tasks with it as well. Since I want to dive into 3D rendering in the future (stay tuned), I figured might as well use Blender and familiarize myself with it. Also, apparently Blender has a ‘Python controlled interface’, which is my go-to programming language for AI/ML of course. Might come in handy if I want to develop custom AI plugins at some point.
Anyway, after importing the two images (eyes open and eyes closed) as video frames into Blender’s video editing menu, it was a bit of fiddling to get the animation just right. When the cover screen wakes up from deep sleep, it plays the animation from the start. If the phone is already awake, it starts playing from any timestamp. So now when it plays from the start, it looks like you’re waking up a sleepy Pikachu, who falls asleep just before the screen times out again.
Lock screen video
What better animation for a full screen flip phone, than the two halves of a Pokéball opening and closing? Well…I’m a lot of things, but not a graphic designer, so I was starting to run into the limits of my image editing capabilities. Instead of creating an animation from scratch, how about using existing material? Luckily, the OG Season 1 opening of Pokémon, has an animation of a Pokéball catching a Pokémon and closing. And also luckily, I have the original material…on DVD. Yep, I am that old. Anyway, here’s the original intro, try to spot the part we need.
Alright, 2 problems with the scene at 0:28s
- it’s a closing animation, not opening. The idea is: open the phone, open the Pokéball. This we can fix by simply playing the closing sequence backwards in Blender. In fact, we can even create a nice open and close loop!
- You youngsters are spoiled, back in my day the episodes were in 480p and we were perfectly happy with it. However, my 1080x2636 phone screen today disagrees. We’re quite a few pixels short. Just leaving it like this would stretch the pixels and make it a permanent eye-sore.
AI to the the rescue! You were promised some light AI and here it finally is. AI upscaling is the term. You feed a low resolution image into an AI model, and it magically spits out a 4K (or even 8K) version of the image. It doesn’t just ‘blow up’ the animation into a blurry mess, it actually uses AI to sharpen and interpolate new pixels. So you get a 4K image that looks like it has always been that way. If you are a gamer, this concept will sound familiar. And it should, because it’s the same idea behind DLSS (Nvidia) and FSR (AMD). For our use case, we use the tested and tried open source AI model called Real-ESRGAN.
The latest version of Real-ESRGAN has an upscaler model specifically trained on anime videos, so that’s just perfect. Here’s a link to the free Google Colab for those of you not blessed with a physical Nvidia GPU. (Or rather, more sensible with your money and time.)
Home screen image
Alright, time for the home stretch, I mean, home screen. For this, I wanted to make it seem as if Pikachu just jumped out of the Pokéball we opened and is ready for adventure. Easy peasy, we just take 1 frame out of the newly upscaled video and place a cheerful Pikachu in front using GIMP. More specifically, it’s this Pikachu which is copyrighted, but falls under a fair use policy! Since this is an educational hobby project, we should be safe to use it. Just don’t be a Team Rocket hoodlum who goes and tries to use it in a commercial setting!
Cherry on top
To give it that typical Pokéball look, on the inside and out, we can put some skins on the outside in a red and white color scheme. After putting in all this effort, I went all in on the nerdy look and chose this one called Battle Ball. However, do note that this skin is quite expensive including shipping and customs and comes up 1mm short on the red top cover. That last bit heavily triggers something inside me that is officially not diagnosed as OCD.
If you want a similar look but at a much lower price and with plausible Poké-deniability, you can order a red phone skin and white phone skin for a lot less on aliexpress and combine the two. I ordered and received these ones as backups, since they might go out of stock as the Flip 3 goes out of manufacturing. Make sure to select the ones for your version of the Flip 3 or Flip 4. None of this content is sponsored, and these are not affiliate links. I just ordered them for myself and would save you an evening scouring the internet, like I did.
Anyway, hope you had fun, learned a thing or two and are now ready to catch em all!
I take no responsibility for people throwing their newly themed Flip phones at yellow thunder mice outdoors.
