BBC Micro / ASCII Music Video

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