11/09/2006

The Making of One Man's Plans Video

I've mentioned before that my videos are made with a program I wrote that uses the same agent technology as the Help Assistant paper clip in Microsoft applications.  Later on I used it for everything but the visible cartoon characters, but in the beginning I was really fond of them (L to R here: Cristal, Genie and E-Woman).

The words in this video are from a piece of short fiction I wrote titled One Man's Plans (in Corrected Works, linked to from here)  Note how the synthetic voice can barely keep up with the words, unfortunately making the vocal more irritating than it should be.  All the characters' movements are choreographed and synchronized by the program.

The music is from a few loops I bent, folded and mutilated; the "guitar" is from some Central Asian folk music that sounds nothing like this.

I can't believe how much work I put into the program behind this; luckily I've gotten a lot of use from it over the past 5 or 6 years.  Nowadays people can make movies a lot more easily by doing "machinima" -- recording action from a high-end video game, then dubbing in the voices.  But in 2000, it was hard to record the screen, much less stage a scene.