One Man's Plans

I've mentioned before that my videos are made with a program I wrote that uses the same agent technology as the irritating Help Assistant paper clip in Microsoft applications.  Nowadays I use it for everything but the cartoon characters, but in the beginning I was really fond of them (L to R here: Cristal, Genie and E-Woman).

The words in this video are from a piece of short fiction I wrote titled One Man's Plans.  Note that the synthetic voice does just an OK job of keeping up with the words.  All the characters' movements are choreographed and synchronized by the program.

The music is from a few loops I bent, folded and mutilated; the "guitar" is from some Central Asian folk music that sounds nothing like this.

I can't believe how much work I put into this program; luckily I've gotten a lot of use from it over the past 5 or 6 years.  Nowadays people can make movies a lot more easily by doing "machinima" -- recording action from a high-end video game, then dubbing in the voices.  But in 2000, it was hard to record the screen, much less stage a scene.