Incredible PowerPoint recreation of Tokyo Station features over 2,000 digital objects

Anything can be a canvas, even a program meant for slideshow presentations; and this one comes to life like an anime!

Japan’s Tokyo Station is one of the most beautiful and iconic stations in the country, and there are plenty of vivid photographs out on the Internet showcasing its 20th century architecture and perfect angles. It’s an especially beautiful sight when it’s illuminated, as you can see here:

▼ A beautiful station that captures the imagination

Little wonder, then, that this phenomenal building has inspired some creative works since it was founded in 1914. One of the more recent homages to Tokyo station is impressive not just in its aesthetics but also its medium: rather than being painted on a canvas or even drawn in a digital studio, this masterpiece was drawn entirely in the Microsoft Office program PowerPoint.

By creating shapes and then formatting them for color, shape and line-width, this artist (Gee Tee) was able to recreate the distinctive curves and sharp lines of the station in full, right down to the clock faces and edged windows.

▼ The video starts with a showcase of the finished product, moving parts and all

While PowerPoint primarily deals in simple shapes like circles and squares, it’s possible to create much more complicated shapes by blending two basic shapes together with the “Group” function. This allows you to move the combined shapes around as though they were one, although once you’re dealing with as many combined shapes in such a dense capacity as this Tokyo Station image, you’d better prepare for your computer to freeze a few times while moving everything around.

▼ When promoting the video on Twitter, Gee Tee posted a bonus shot highlighting all the individual bits

In the comment to this tweet, the artist wrote:

“This is how it looks when you Ungroup all the elements in the main station building… I don’t care to count, but there’s somewhere between 2,000 to 3,000 objects in there! Naturally, the data load was really intense and my computer said “Window not responding” about 10 times throughout… This window is heavy…”

▼ Things get even more complex when the surrounding landscape and greenery is blocked in, too

The final effect is incredible, with trains, cars and people milling about and throughout the station, but achieving that bustling scene meant creating even more tiny artworks and assigning them animations using the PowerPoint Custom Path tools.

▼ So much is happening on this screen!

The comments ranged from stunned to amazed to disbelief. Who ever heard of using PowerPoint to make a living portrait, let alone one this complicated?

“I would never have thought of something like this.”
“I was expecting a Tyrannosaurus Rex to appear at the end and start rampaging.”
“I’m emotional over this!”

The Tyrannosaurus comment is in reference to another one of Gee Tee’s incredible animations, this one using origami (the channel’s main focus) rather than slideshow elements.

Can’t get enough of people using Microsoft Office programs for art? Check out the stylish anime art you can make in Microsoft Excel! In fact, Excel has proven popular as an illustrative tool before, so maybe it’s about time someone upped the game by switching to PowerPoint.

Source: YouTube/Gee Tee, Twitter/@origami_GeeTee via Togech
Images: YouTube/Gee Tee



Credit:
at 18:16

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