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Ari Zilnik
Broadcast graphics, iOSSide ProjectDesigner, Builder

Telop

Telop is a 1984 late-night weather broadcast from Osaka, rebuilt down to the VHS tape and running live on an iPhone.

It’s a quick brief for the morning or evening. It tells you whether to bring an umbrella, gives you last night’s scores before you meet friends at the bar, and shows how the trains are running on the way home.

I’ve always loved the look and feel of the era, and this was my chance to build it with today’s technology.

In public beta on iPhone

Tonight’s forecast, the way it looked in 1984.

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Telop on an iPhone, Toronto's weather in Japanese and English

Measured, then judged

I wanted every detail to be right. The goal was simple: put a Telop card next to the same card from the real 1984 tape, and make them hard to tell apart. So I gave my eye a second opinion. Agents rebuilt the broadcast’s cards against frames from that tape over ten loops, and kept a change only when the picture measurably got closer. The numbers showed when we were getting closer, and my eye decided when it was right.

Weather title, as Telop rendered it at loop 9
Weather title, from the 1984 broadcast
How far each loop's renders were from the 1984 frames: by loop 9, 5× closer than the first renderidentical to 19840123456789first renderhalf the gain, in the first loop5× closer to 1984

The chain

The part I’m proudest of is how fast the signal runs, on the page and on the phone. Here’s one detail of the card, four times: drawn clean, then after the broadcast, the tape and the playback.

  1. 01 Clean raster

  2. I/Q band-limit on air
  3. FM luma channel · Color-under and deck delay · Time-base error and head switching · FM noise, mottle, chroma blotches · Dropouts
  4. 1H delay line and field blend · Levels, white knee, overscan

The night shift

I directed and the agents built, mostly overnight, and in the morning I made the calls. Most of it I kept. A team I’d set up in Paperclip, a tool for running agents on their own, started running away from me, so I shut it down.

  1. The gauntlet. Ari: An authentic piece of 1980s Japan, with extreme detail and accuracy, at 120 frames a second. The agents: Every card rebuilt against the 1984 frames, keeping only what got closer. Approved.
  2. The clock. Ari: Can we make the clock run smooth at 120 fps, to flex a bit? The agents: The second hand moves every frame now. Only the hands are redrawn, so it stays cheap. Approved.
  3. A team of agents, on Paperclip. Ari: Set up a team in Paperclip to help me build this app. The agents: Telop Studio is running: a director, two builders, a critic and a researcher, on a $500 cap. Ari: I don’t want it to run amok! Killed.

The world

The reference was the magazines that showed off the new technology of the day: the Walkman, Technics turntables, the jump from camera to CG.

Telop’s app icon: a red sun with a cloud, on broadcast blue
Magazine centerfold, 降り立てば、もう知っている。: a traveler in a trench coat checks his iPhone in a 1984 arrivals hall at night; beside him, Telop’s first page, the night’s baseball score and the Toronto subway, captioned in English and Japanese
Magazine ad, 空のうえから、おやすみなさい: a typhoon seen from orbit, and Telop’s Kansai forecast on an iPhoneMagazine ad, 通勤快晴: commuters on an evening train, cropped below their faces, and Telop’s forecast on an iPhone
Arrivals hall: a staged, AI-generated photograph · Typhoon: NASA Johnson Space Center, STS51I-35-75 · Commuters: “Japan, train ride after work”, Marie-Sophie Mejan, CC BY 4.0, cropped and toned

終, the end

WEATHER REPORT / END, sponsored by 大島屋: the weather’s end card, as Telop renders it, in English and in Japanese (お天気のお知らせ／終)
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