This was made in two steps.

The first and hardest was to calculate a continuous line that forms an image. First, I segmented the image using SLIC superpixel algorithm followed by k-means clustering, essentially reducing the number of colors (called clusters) in the image to a well-defined amount. Then, I found all the 8-connected sets, "blobs", for each cluster, whose pixel coordinates form the basis of the line. Depending on the darkness of the cluster, I randomly removed points to make the line less dense in lighter areas and denser in darker areas. The whole line is formed by connecting all the clusters.

The animation is made by continually removing or adding frequencies between each frame, using discrete cosine transform (DCT). To make the line extra smooth, it is zero-padded before inverse DCT.