Images for the Digital Mind
An experimental visual music piece, created from the concept of ASCII art in motion. Original animations and various stock footage were placed through an After Effects script to generate the ASCII animations. The song used is Schlomo's: Emerge From Smoke.
Mood Board
Technical Process
The script used to create the ASCII animations is an After Effects plugin called L3tt3rM4pp3r. https://aescripts.com/l3tt3rm4pp3r/
Starting off you are required to export a character sheet that the script can understand. This is done by choosing exactly what font you want and running it through BMFont, a program that will generate a character sheet based on the font file. In BMFont you can select and deselect which characters in the font you want to include in the character sheet. The BMFont program will export a file in the .fnt format.
The AE plugin package also comes with several Photoshop scripts to generate the character sheet needed for the plugin. The specific script used for the project takes the .fnt file generated by BMFont and seperates every character into its own seperate layer and lays the characters in a single line.
The .psd file saved from Photoshop needs to be brought into the timeline with whatever the L33t3rM4p3r effect is applied to. All that is left and needed to get the effect working properly is to change the Mapping Texture option to the .psd file in the timeline and the Symbols in Mapping Texture needs to be changed to the number of characters that are in your character sheet. The effect can turn any type of file brought into After Effects into ASCII art and also have it retain its color information. It can even process exports from C4D if you choose to do so.
