Well, this took some work. Originally I were casually experimenting with making a sligthly cooler version of the crystal ball from my last secret santa entry, and then it escalated somewhat from there. Still a little messy, but I refuse to work another minute on this now.

Once again I've been scripting a bit of python code to keep the animation sane. The crystal ball animation itself was drawn in black, white and grey, and then translated to the dithered blue colors of the crystal ball. Some parts of it (the Skull and the Shadowy Figure With Glowing Eyes) were "rotoscoped" on rough animation put together in blender. Originally, the script I wrote also picked the light levels of the wizard based on total white - black on the orb animation, but I've spent what feels like days manually adjusting the results.

And yeah, the relatively long shot of a falling apple is a reference to the animation I used to test the crystal ball animation system before I comitted to animating something of my own.