Go go gadget video quality destroyer.

Every (other) frame is composed of frames from Steamboat Willie brightness-scaled and stacked on top of one another!
I could have done the audio the same way, but it isn't as interesting and just ends up muffled and distorted. Instead, each 1/24th of a second of audio is pulled from the most similar audio slice in Steamboat Willie.
This single minute of video took almost 6 hours to render. For the proof-of-concept, I think one minute is enough.
This project is actually almost a year in the making, but when I originally had this idea, I couldn't think of any good videos to experiment with. Then 2024 rolled around, and with it a recently-public black-and-white video that everybody's talking about. Still took a month to work out the kinks, though.

Math and Program Specifics:
Each frame is a linear combination of the 65 most important Steamboat Willie frames (the 65 frames that, when overlaid on top of one another, best recreate the BA frame), although only the top 8 frames after the 3 most significant are displayed on the right side (I noticed that the 3 actually most significant frames are mostly just used to set the mean of the frame and usually don't have a lot of features). The system is solved using an ElasticNet linear model, which helps to minimize the number of frames used and their coefficients. I have an overview of a similar technique in my Delay Lama video. The audio just checks for smallest root-mean-squared error between the target Bad Apple!! audio spectrum vector and each 1/24th-second spectrum vector in Steamboat Willie, then scales it to avoid sudden loudness changes. The thumbnail was generated by calculating the points of a 3D projection on the screen and warping the images to match (no actual 3D engine was used). I was considering making the entire video look like the thumbnail, but that made it really hard to see individual features and I don't think it was actually as interesting.

If somehow it's easier for you to understand, the video almost uses something like a Fourier transform, but instead of sine waves, the original image is broken down into Steamboat Willie frames and then the most significant frames are added back together.

#badapple #steamboatwillie #mickeymouse #linearalgebra #graphics #art

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