There's a glitch in the matrix! That movie really blew my mind when I was a teenager. So I wanted to explore the idea of the terminal window alive with code.

My initial idea was to screen capture a command prompt window doing something complex. I struggled to find something that would produce more than a few seconds of action, until I realized that the initial installation of ComfyUI would work. But I wanted something that was more sporadic. So I loaded up Chrome and opened the Developer Tools, and did a screen capture of the Elements tab while manually opening tons of different bookmarks. Then I took the videos into After Effects and created a more intense variation by removing any static frames through the use of the Duplicate Frame Remover 3 plugin. From there I had some real fun by layering the L3TT3RM4PP3R plugin on top of these videos to make them feel more glitchy.

I've long had a deep love of ASCII art. Sometimes it can be strangely impressionistic and other times intensely abstract. So I used the L3TT3RM4PP3R plugin in After Effects to take a whole bunch of different videos and transform them into different forms of ASCII art. It was interesting to experiment with different ideas and see what felt like raw data versus ASCII daydreams. I was excited to reach exactly what I had in my mind's eye for these scenes.

As an experiment, I loaded up AnimateDiff in ComfyAI and did a txt2video render asking it to visualize computer code and also fed it an image of a command prompt window into the IPAdapter for unclip processing. This resulted in a video that looks like programming an alien language and it concatenates in a unique way. Also I had some extra credits on RunwayML and so I asked it to visualize a keyboard exploding. I know kung fu.

Released March 2024