MOBILE USERS this thing seems to really choke on mobile, so maybe don't even try

Some things in this film that you can't do in a standard video player:

Unknown runtime

No rewinding, no skipping ahead

Extremely dense patterns that would get destroyed by video compression

Moiré effects that change if you mess with the zoom setting on your browser

Effects that change depending on if you're using flash player or Ruffle

And more!

Technical note:

Most of the effects here are done with gradients, shape tweens, bitmap fills and blending modes, meaning something like this theoretically could have been made as early as 2005 (maybe blending modes came a little later?), though at the time the narration probably would have seemed very weird. It likely wouldn't have been able to run at 60fps, either.

There's almost no code - just the interactive stuff is as3, which I'd never used before this. I've decided I hate it.

Here's the source file, if you want a peek behind the curtain (no audio, it makes the file like 20x bigger)

Big thanks to:

• Sarah's Dad, for letting me use his voice
• Bill's Dad & the rightsholders of Omerp Productions, for letting me use their archive of 2003-era flash files
• Harvey for letting me use his music, which you can buy here and here or listen to free right here on NG

(Update 5/19/2023)

We won the jam which is cool! (1st interactive movie). Today I was talking to Harvey about what the "point" of the movie is supposed to be, and I was actually able to put it pretty succinctly, so I thought I'd paste it here as the official "artist's statement." (Spoilers):

The thing I was getting at in the video was that the domino-effect of people building on each others' ideas is less likely to happen if the medium is already "dead," which is important because every antiquated way of doing things still has it's own unique aesthetic strengths in addition to its shortcomings. (you kind of have to put the pieces together yourself that that's the thesis of the video - the idea that old technology can have obscure strengths over new technologies is only spelled out plainly in the phone call at the end)

Oh also, we were on the front page of Hacker News for a minute! If you want to see a bunch of nerds reminisce about flash, check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35649245