One night last week David Ascher sent me a challenge on twitter:
@humphd challenge: do http://t.co/XImyz11 on the web ;-)
Funnily enough, I'd seen this demo earlier in the day. It's a fantastically simple, yet captivating video by Joerg Piringer. He describes it like this:
i made video called “unicode”. it shows all displayable characters in the unicode range 0 – 65536 (49571 characters). one character per frame. i was starting with adobe after effects but in the end used a custom written program that just filed out png-images. i then had ffmpeg assemble them together to the 33 minutes of video.
Luckily for me, the list of printable unicode characters was already posted with the demo. Challenge accepted! Here's the final product:
I wanted to write the simplest approximation of this using nothing but html5. I also added some music for good measure. Part of why I decided to do this was to try and draw attention to the fact that while the web gets criticized for not having all the sexy Adobe-style content creation tools people say we need, in reality it often does away with the need for them. The web, the browser--these are the new content creation tools.
Thanks to Joerg for the great idea, and David for the challenge.