Burnin Fever Update 2 - investigating ASCII art

Burnin Fever Update 2 -investigating ASCII art

Whilst browsing the internet I managed to come across someones fan made music video to synthpop artist Com Truise a similar artist to my chosen one. After watching the video one thing that particularly stood out to me was the use of ASCII animation and old computer text effects to convey a sort of software like feel to the song. This is something I believe would work well for my own music video in scenes depicting the digital world and the computer hackers virus to allude to a similar software theme i.e software which doesn't look exactly safe and for commercial use.

After witnessing this video I started to investigate ways I could reproduce such an effect however with live footage rather than just animated frames. My first option during this investigation was HasciiCam  and AAlib, programs which allows users to convert webcam footage into ascii art real time. The intial idea was to first film the shots I desired to be in ASCII and then using Manycam mount the footage to replace my face on the webcam, then I would use some external software to record the footage on my PC. The problem with this however was the fact that both HasciiCam and AAlib would only work on linux operating system and unfortunatly I do not have said system and im not in contact with anyone who has a computer with linux therefore I had to change my plan of approach.

Experimenting with Krazydad

After searching the web for alternatives I came across website krazydad.com/asciicam/ which allowed me to re-create a similar effect to HasciiCam whilst running on a windows computer. The problem with this site was getting filmed footage onto it and then capturing footage of my computer monitor whilst the webcam effect is taking place. This would cause a lot of complications just to my  achive my desired effect therefore once again I sought for a more simpler and easier route.

Finally I came across an app called RealWorldAscii on the app store which allows people to film in ASCII art here are my experiments with the app below.

I plan to use this app to film certain scenes in ASCII to convey the desired "hacker software look" as mentioned above. So far my favourite version of the effect is the more coloured one as it conveys the most amount of detail to allow the forms to be much more recognisable rather than the black and white version. However, I believe that the black and white version will have its place with the right context for instance a possible close up shot of the robots head in said filter could serve to create a sort of abstract yet disorientating effect.