For A Social Cause

How It Inspires

The goal is to get kids to watch this video and learn something about videogame processors and the evolutionary history of computers, within the context of understanding programming language itself.  The video will also describe and break down some of the elements of animation within videogames, using popular classics as examples.

Further inspiration will come from the street art to be produced as a promotion for the video.  One piece might be 50' tall.  Another could be just a mere 15' in height.  There definitely will be an animated game to be used as an example in the lesson of stop motion photography, one of the subjects to be explained and dissected within the arts educational framework for the video.

Please Fund This Project!  This isn't being pitched exactly as a Sandy Hook benefit or anything, but there's a belief that this approach could have some kind of a positive impact on teenagers; maybe on society as a whole, by encouraging people to re-familiarize themselves with the ancient classics of videogames.

This is a good example of what we're talking about here.  This is one of the scariest dudes ever from Super Mario.  He's like a dragon and he has spikes and he shoots flames.  Yet still it really doesn't translate the same way subconsciously as many of the popular military simulation games out there.

Take a look also at the blocky nature of the shapes.  These are pixellated because the original graphic is so incredibly small.  When you enlarge the image, you can see where the actual placement for each pixel is supposed to be.

You can learn more about Pixels by reading further into this blog.  Thanks!





What We're Up Against

Ultraviolent videogames are those in which you kill everyone on the planet until you are the last person alive.  It's a murderous fantasy played out by countless of our youth, and some of them counted among the ranks of Americans are serving life sentences (or death sentences) for acting out these fantasies in public.  One thing that all of these young people had in common was an obsession with first-person shooters.

Article from NY Times about studying the effects of playing violent video games from Feb. 11 2013 expresses while there's no guarantee that violent videogames compel antisocial psychopathic behavior, it will cause them to dish out more hot sauce [read article].

Call of Duty 4 had a marketing budget which could be estimated in the tens of millions.  While there's no way to compete with that fortune, it makes sense to create street art in favor of a newfound familiarity with classic videogames, with the interest of promoting those games with the same fervent intensity as the epic epidemics invading teenagers' brains with increasingly more incredible weaponry.

Not to set foot in this like a Low Jeeberman (Senator from CT) because being a cranky old guy who wants to invade Iraq and eliminate swear words from Rap music is not a priority.  But to take a stance in a creative, artistic way that inspires people, not one that limits the public to certain behavior by laws, but one which inspires the youth to get intrigued by something more interesting.

Funding Overview

Supamural is a conceptual art project which has only been done once  before (by a penguin). The project seeks to re-create scenes from classic videogames using stencils and stop motion photography. But this is more than just an art project. It's also a challenge to whichever group is doing it. 

Funding will go towards the personal time expended for the project, as well as for supplies and materials.  Time invested will be the equivalent of 4 full work weeks.  Additional support will go towards additional murals.  

Computers have evolved rapidly in the past 20 years. The computers of today are now more than 150,000 times faster in processor speed, with 15,000 times as much random access memory than their predecessors. Processing speed and RAM have evolved tremendously. It makes it still more amazing that game designers in the 80's were capable of creating the games they made, considering the limitations.

Screen resolution has improved immensely. On an old Nintendo Game, you were able to use only 13 colors at a time. This was to fit in a 256 by 256 canvas. Whereas today, a videogame can have millions of colors, on a screen with millions of pixels.

The most basic level of any computer image, regardless of when it was created, is thepixel. It's a single colored square.

You should seriously consider helping to fund this project.
Because videogames have been evolving with the rest of the technology.

Hyper-Realism is when something computer generated looks more real than something in real life. Here is an actual tank in Syria. Note how adding pixellated 8 bit graphics takes away from the hyper-realism.

There's something called "Conceptual Art." That's where you create a set of plans for people to follow. Meaning that you create not just an art project for yourself, but something that can be repeated by other groups.

The goal is to produce an educational film about videogames. As well as to produce a conceptual art project for groups to re-create. It will contain original 8 bit graphics that people can identify. Files will be made so that these images can be cut out by a plotter cutter on sheets to be used as stencils.

Participants will also learn about game design and game theory. And game design. For example the Galaga ship is only 16 pixels by 16 pixels in 3 colors.

The project goal is to re-enact a scene from a classic videogame. But the wall needs to be essentially "programmed" the same way the game is in order for the stop motion video to work correctly. All parameters must be taken into consideration.

It's a regimented series of tasks, from extracting graphics, to cutting shapes, to organizing the stencils. That's just the preparation work. A background needs to be prepared, and the end result will be a video we can use to help promote and encourage young people to try these awesome classic games.

This won't be an easy task, however. It will involve lots of organizing and planning. For example, the frame of each object and the position of that image relative to its previous position must be carefully planned, for every object on screen in order for the entire video to appear to be fully animated.

This is the right time for this, too. Right now, if you were born in 1970, you're about 40 or so. If you had kids in your 30's they're probably just entering their teens. Classic games are making the transition from retro to vintage right now as we speak.

This is the right time for this, too. Nothing beautifies a neighborhood like an 8-bit flying fish. And the minds of our youth today are trapped in some kind of guarded fortress. We must develop a strategy to bring them out into a safer environment.

This project won't cost a fortune. $2500 should be enough to get one done correctly. More funding will result in better work, certainly, but if there is enough support, we'll do more of these. There are some pretty cool rewards available.

We'd like to make these plans available to art teachers around the country, for teachers who are interested in creating something of the same caliber and quality. All that you need are the instructions, and that's what conceptual art is. Let's educate kids and fight back against hyper-realistic ultraviolent games with 8bit classic memories of a time when life was simpler and games were still just as fun.