I was curious about the "provenance" of the .xls version of the AC/DC ASCII-art video so I looked into the file. The properties include a creation date of 2008-10-14 by Phil Clandillon. This is what Phil Clandillon says about the award-winning Excel Video: http://work.clandillon.com/#AC-DC-Rocks-the-Office
This version was designed to promote the release of "Black Ice" and gives a track list, with "Rock N Roll Train" as the first track. Since (according to Wikipedia) digital versions were not authorized by AC/DC, the Excel-embedded partial track is a rarity. There are links in the spreadsheet, to BeingAngus.com. That domain is defunct, but acdcrocks.com is still working. The video has more block-lettered caption scrolls during the lead-in that are not from the same file. The single-sheet file acdc.xls is the download. You can see it in the YouTube video, along with the play and stop buttons and a portion of the track list on the right hand of the screen. Oh, and Wikipedia is out of date about MP3s. Amazon.com has a few (but not "Rock and Roll Train") plus many more from tribute and cover bands. Fans of the band will enjoy the video about the creation of the "Rock N Roll Train" music video that was used to promote the album: < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys5eEpT0_S0>. The result is at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3kDWF_CSdo>. In it you can see that the ASCII video was derived from some of the green-screen insertions in the full video. - orcmid (who loves this stuff) -----Original Message----- From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamil...@acm.org] Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 18:11 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: RE: Yes. You can do this with OpenOffice. (MysteryGuitarMan video with OpenOffice Mac) I just noticed that the document is in XLS format, though it is seen running in OpenOffice.org Calc. (On a Mac?) The AC/DC ASCII-art video (one I first saw in an XLS format a couple of years ago) as done in ODS doesn't use any Windows-specific objects. The narrative explaining how that one was done (linked by Andrea) goes into that. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 15:40 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Yes. You can do this with OpenOffice. (MysteryGuitarMan video with OpenOffice Mac) On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Andreas Säger <ville...@t-online.de> wrote: > Am 10.08.2012 02:24, Rob Weir wrote: >> >> >> And here is the "behind the scenes" video that explains how he did it: >> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PCTinsZ7dM >> > > Having a video converter which creates the coarse pixel frames, all you need > is one matrix of color values per frame and script to dump them into the > Calc document. > > Matrix of 16 colors calculated from 32x32 random values: >> >> http://www.mediafire.com/file/zfw69gddrcwacoc/PixelMatrix.ods > Cool. How would we get the pixel level numeric data into the spreadsheet initially? I assume there is nothing in the macro language that can parse image data at that level. So we'd need to call out to a helper library? Also, one other nice time to have -- not strictly necessary, but would improve the results -- picking an optimal color palette that best matches the colors in the original image. There are some standard algorithms for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quantization -Rob > >
