
BBC Micro / ASCII Music Video - arachnophobe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC25gRwbpsg
======
arachnophobe
Basically this is what you get if you learn to code in the early eighties,
then try picking up thirty years later.

I was asked by a friend who is in the band if I had done any graphics work or
was interested in doing anything for a music video. Graphics are not something
I have done before except [ _cough_ ] years ago on the BBC Micro, which is
where the 8-bit geometric graphics and code came from.

The conversion from the video of the singer to ASCII was done via ffmpeg to
de-frame/re-frame the video and a hacked together C# program that works well
enough[0] to convert each frame to letter of the right font, size,
words/letters (which are the lyrics - the letters in each line are used for
the ASCII rendering of the singer while that line is being sung).

The combination of the two sets of graphics into a far better music video was
done by a guy called Chris Bate from FilmBee.

I've submitted this as there was a discussion[1] a few weeks ago about ASCII
art being dead or alive while I was putting this together.

[0]'Well enough' \- I couldn't get it to run and flat line all the CPUs when
running parallel processing. I caused a catastrophic memory leak by modifying
a couple of the methods thinking I'd improve something. I dread to think what
it has done to the lifetime of the two SSD while it's been firing GBs of data
at.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411059)

