7/10/2008 - Ascii Star Wars (2 movies)

Back when I was college and majoring in Computer Science, we would program using the good old Terminal screen. Similar to the MS-DOS prompt, it's nothing but text-based input. It's oh-so primitive compared to the graphical input with the mouse and cursor, and more recently touch-based controls. Yet, some people actually prefer the text-based input and can do things much faster than others using a mouse. Text input is one thing... text animation is something different altogether, however. Imagine that your only tool to create a picture on the computer is with what is available on the keyboard: letters, numbers, and symbols. As you can imagine, you'd mostly get stick figures. Sure, there are some beautiful examples of ascii art, some of which you can see at this website: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/

But imagine again, that you only had these ascii characters to work with, AND you were going to make an animation out of it. Let's just say that it would require A LOT of imagination. And yet, there is always a supply of folks who have enough time, dedication, and imagination to create ascii animation -- even animation based on a feature length movie. Of course, such a movie would have to be Star Wars, which has a legion of fans that meet the exact criteria. Through collaborative effort an ascii version of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was made and most of it was captured to YouTube: