Spaceballs Dancer

Those who remember the old Amiga demoscene might recall “State of the Art” by the Spaceballs. At the time this was ground breaking with a vectorised dancer moving around fullscreen with clipping. It was all but an MTV video with dance music and fast strobing visuals.

As a member of some retro groups that regularly post youtube videos of them. After seeing it again I decided to have a go at recreating it.

I found a video online of a dancer going through a routine that I downloaded using youtube-dl and then imported into Adobe Premier to find a small loop.
Once exported I used ffmpeg to output each frame to jpgs. At 30fps this created around 60 images that I loaded into gimp as individual layers. Using the magic wand and lots of patience I removed the background from each one. It took a while and I’m still searching for a free piece of software that could help here. Or next time I’ll find a green screen dancer perhaps.

Once all the frames had been saved individually back out from the layers, they were processed through a cli tool to create them as SVG. These points were then extracted using a quick script and loaded into a json document.

Running out of time to put a music player on it - I’ll revisit it at some point.