Animated text, badass

[Mensan]

How much time did this take?

[Tulo]

Old, but cool nonetheless.

[Guest GSRchick714]

Thats pretty cool but sad that someone had so much time!

Its hard for me to see unless I sit back a bit

[Casper]

re

[Drunkendubber]

not much time to do at all

dump the movie into stills,

convert each image to ascii, (programs do this for you)

reassemble images in flash or in a gif

post on interweb

[Trouble Maker]

I meant to explain approximately how they did this last time it was posted (back in the stone ages), but didn't. I will this time.

 

Any modern codec that I know of uses a few things to reduce the size but approximately keep the 'image' there, the main stay is usually this. They only capture a full 'image' ever once in a while. For mpeg4 (DVD's) that's about twice a second. It will do things like get a brand new image if the scene completely changes, or make more full 'images' a second if alot of things on the screen are changing. It does this because most of the time not very much of the screen changes in half a second (back grounds). The parts of the screen that do change might only 'move'. Think of a woman with a red dress on, that dress only 'moves' a little bit in a half a second. They use vectors to show how portions of the screen move during that half a second.

 

So imagine you have half a second of footage, say Neo shooting at the Agent. It's put through this codec and spit back out and black looks black, red looks red, and blue looks blue. Well instead of putting it back through that codec they put it back through one that makes something white look like spaces, something a little darker look like ... or ,,,,, darker yet is something like ccc or sss and the darkest portions gets an R, T, A or C. So instead of a white back ground it's a back ground of blank spaces. Instead of a black suit moving around (the Agent), it's a suit of R, T, C, and S's.

 

Or they could have done something similar but frame by frame. But this was some sort of 'transfer program'. They made a program to do this. Look at the site address. This was probably a (senior) project for someone in the graphic design (not art, programming) or computer science school. They didn't do it by hand.

 

Edit: Written while Kyle was posting (didn't see his post). smile.gif I didn't know there were programs to convert a still to ascii characters, pretty cool.