After a failed attempt to invade Princess Bunnydew's home base on planet Perth, Lord Montclair has retreated.

With help from the Lions of Agora and the Teleprompter Device, Princess Bunnydew of the Conejito Alliance has tracked down Lord Montclair to his palace in the sky.

We begin with Lord Montclair on the run after Princess Bunnydew has just drank a can of whoop@ss . . .

The highest quality version is a 640x480 pixel, 30fps motion-JPEG AVI. Filmed using a canon SD-300 teeny still camera. We have fun running around in the raw footage.

the process

I did kind of "classic rotoscoping" for the lightsaber fight. I didn't want to look too much into how Lucas was doing it... but i got the sense/gut feel putting very bright rectangles over the sticks we were fighting with, at 20-30fps would be pretty effective -- and it was! 🤗

So I extracted every frame from the 4 motion-JPEG recordings. Those are like a stream of continual full frame JPEG frames, but with a common huffman table at the front to save (a little) space) -- so extracting every JPEG frame is lossless!

OK, great, so now I have like... 1000 or so frames.

So I built a small webpage that put up the first frame, and waited for 4 browser/user click events, capturing the X/Y position over the image for each click.

So it was... click "bad guy" bottom of saber; click "bad guy" top of saber; repeat for me.

That was tedious, so I spread it out over 2 days. 😆

I started w/ the first ~3 seconds and did a preview and was like.... holy shit this works really well -- and the process is so crude!!

So now I had the information needed -- so the "rotoscoping" was easy and automate-able then with a small script using ImageMagick,

drawing rects, with some "glow", for each X/Y pair.

Once done, audiophile engineer BF Hunter put in saber samples, yay!

This was a super fun 3-day weekend project, close to my heart (I'd kill to work for a job doing star wars effects) 😻

Art & Music

commute

electricsheep-flock-244-80000-7

Internet Archive Holiday Party at 300 Funston

Topless

VJ-Style Strippers

3L vj loops series 6

The Drake Saga

stairs where i worked

GrooveTV #302 - Signal Path

GrooveTV #106 - Umphrey's McGee

Design Of Signage VJ Clips

La Marche de la Luna