• Back from the past: ASCII MOVIES

    Today I’ve found in my bookmarks a few links about an old passion shared between many IT enthusiasts in the 80s: ASCII Art.

    Small pieces of art, ancient mosaics created with letters, numbers and characters from the future.

    One of the latest evolutions of this art has been the creation of animations first and entire movies. Finally we’ve seen software able to transform digital video output into ASCII animations, videogames graphic routed to ASCII terminals and the popular video player VLC to add a video plugin to reproduce videos in ASCII (with the option to see them in color).

    While many of you may remember such links, I want to share them (or at least the ones still living on the internet) to share some nostalgic memories or surprising evidences of a mysterious past…

    First of all one of the biggest classics: Star Wars

    Then Matrix

    Some good Classic Rock Videoclip

    and finally one of my favourites, Music Videos in ASCII which singer is a C64 digitized voice

    There are various other sites, however if you would like to see how a specific movie/video would look like, you can always use our favourite player, VLC, Go to VLC menu -> Preferences -> Choose “Video” -> “Output Module” and select “Color ASCII art video output” for Colorized ASCII or “ASCII-art video output”.

    Open a video file and feel the difference!