Omg I love this! I have been finding excuses to do little animation engine features that arent on the critical path of development for the sake of creative self-indulgence. Such features shipped was alpha channel based fading using the fundamental opengl fade parameter (under the hood its a linear interpolation of alpha values over 256, pieced together over a provided pair of timestamps).

I tell you what I'll do today on my dev time, I'll try implementing grayscale without aby research on pause and then compare notes (I'm assuming this wc code is available somewhere, which may be a bad assumption)