Expert: Andrew Ransavage - 8/19/2009

Question
I had an idea that in concept is pretty simple, but at least when it comes to animating it seems to be tough. I wanted to create a length wise image of the falling code from "The Matrix" but online there seemed only to be landscape shaped images of the falling code as wallpapers. Well I took the most crisp image online that I could find, sampled a few images of lines of code, and pasted them back together in a way that would produce a length-wise image and maintaining the general look that the code had from the original image. Also I increased the contrast to get rid of green glare from the characters and applied a tiled effect to the image. After completing the single image I cut the lengthwise image into 20 different files of equal dimensions all the way down through the image. From here I would like to restack the images in different sequences (ex. 1-20, or 20-19, or 19-18) basically taking one from the bottom and putting it on top to produce images that when run in order will make it look like the code is falling as to be used in an animated GIF. Problem being doing that by hand would be very time consuming. Do you know a way to stack images on top of one another in a particular sequence? Maybe a certain software? I feel I am in good so far. I just want to find an easier way to sequence the sections.

Answer
Hi, I think I understand your question but I'm not aware of any application that will do exactly what you want in an automated way.  If I were doing this I would probably be using Adobe After Effects and have to do the sequences by hand. I suspect that if you did 3 or 4 lines you could then copy and repeat those without it being too obvious.  You could use a 3D app like 3ds max that will animate objects along a path, but there is no simple way to randomize the sequence, you'd still have to do that by hand. Hope this helps...

Andrew