Ok, ascii time... so you have a video clip and you want to turn it
into an ascii art movie. Well, simple enough if you use adobe after
effects. (And by simple I mean relatively hard unless you really
know what you are doing.) Let's begin...

Ok, you take a video clip and turn it into a monochrome image, then
create an array of ascii characters in after effects. Now you map the
darkest parts of the image to characters like . , : and you map
the brightest parts of the image to characters like 3 8 #

And you get something like the image above.

You can add color two ways, just add back in the original color values from
the footage, or compute the red green and blue chanels separately, and
then recombine thus:



Check out a little DIVX clip (divx 3 required)