[Help] Complete noob here; want to know how you can easily fake console text for filmmaking purposes

5    23 Jul 2015 02:15 by u/Kaddon

Hello all,

Sorry if this is not the appropriate place here. I have gone into a bit of programming before, but have forgotten most of what I know. What would be an easy way to replicate a fake console, and stuff for filmmaking purposes? Something like what happens here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2sHIS7_B44 . I was curious, since I might want to film something that includes something like that, but more specific and controllable text than hackertyper.com

Thank you guys!

9 comments

3 u/SelfReferenceParadox 23 Jul 2015 05:00

Not quite what you want, but hackertyper.net is relevant.

1 u/awshidahak 23 Jul 2015 02:24

Do you have anything specific in mind (as to the text you would wish to show on the console)? If you're messing with python, you might wish to use time.sleep to make pauses in your output. (So there's one tip without much idea as to what you're wanting).

0 u/Kaddon [OP] 23 Jul 2015 03:14

Hey, thanks for replying!

Hmm, I don't have anything specific in mind, but just things in the video where you could film an actor type, and the program or script would return text, I guess? So in my mind I'm thinking something like have the computer wait for you to type something and press enter, then return its own text after a short delay. I also am now not sure of the logistics of doing that, if that makes sense. So basically how would you, in the end, run this program/script fullscreen or in Terminal/Command Prompt for filming once finished.

Also, how would you generate the loading thingy with [/] that rotates at 1:20?

As well as have the computer return a bunch of lines and a countdown like 1:54 and the end

2 u/awshidahak 23 Jul 2015 05:43

Okay, I think I've found the parts to most of what you want. Here's something easy you can throw together in Bash (linux's shell/batch processing program). It should work in Linux, OSX, or Windows with cygwin.

Any text that you want to display you can display with 

echo
e.g.

echo "Now starting the intriguing daemon"
echo "Initializing core..."
echo -n "Beginning seven times "
sleep 1
echo -n "1 "
sleep 1
echo -n "2 "
sleep 1
echo -n "3 "
sleep 1
echo -n "4 "
sleep 1
echo -n "\nOh, "
sleep 1
echo -n "what the heck... "
sleep 1
echo "5 6 7 8"

Okay, I got a little carried away and included options that I haven't described yet, so I'd better explain them now. Putting -n in between echo and what you'd like to echo will cause echo to not move the cursor to the next line as it normally would. Just play with it and you'll see what I mean. The sleep statement causes the computer to stop processing your script for a specified amount of time, in our case, one second. If you put a \n in your statement to be displayed, that will move the cursor to the next line.

Anyway, when we run our script, it should display this on the screen: (pauses omitted)

Now starting the intriguing daemon
Initializing core...
Beginning seven times 1 2 3 4 
Oh, what the heck... 5 6 7 8

If you want to pause for keyboard input, just put read on it's own line, like this:

echo "Welcome to the secret system\n"
echo -n "Who goes here? "
read
echo -n "Password? "
read
echo "\nOh hey, it's you. Welcome."
echo "Would you like a nice game of chess?"

This will display the welcome message on the screen, ask for login, wait until your actor presses enter, ask for the password, wait for enter again, and then try and not start global thermonuclear war (that last part makes sense if you've seen the movie war games).

I'm aware that this is a long post, and may be a bit to take in all at once if this is new for you. Please feel free to just pick at sections of this post, and don't feel afraid to tell me I haven't explained something well enough. I'll try and break down whatever you need.

As for the more seasoned programmers in this thread, the reason I didn't use loops in my example (even though it would have made less lines of code) is so that I'd only be introducing a few keywords at a time.

As for your spinner, that's a bit more complicated for this lesson (unless there's a really cool simple solution I don't know about. I never used a spinner in a console app before.)

1 u/Kaddon [OP] 23 Jul 2015 06:06

Wow! Thank you so much for that. You explained it very nicely; no other questions from me. That'll work perfectly for what I need for now.

Can't really do much more than give an upvoat, but thank you very much.

1 u/awshidahak 23 Jul 2015 23:47

You're quite welcome.

1 u/PM_UR_BOOBS_4_A_POEM 23 Jul 2015 03:31

Something like this?

https://jurassicsystems.com/

1 u/koalakareklub 23 Jul 2015 20:14

If your trying to fake code input and record it, I suggest just writing the code out in a text editor(sublime or what not). Than use After Effects to animate it the way you want. Theres tons of ways to animate type in after effects, and having the code you want to show laid out in a text file lets you figure out how to structure your animation. All those small things, like the backslash circling around in the brackets can be animated easily in After Effects.

Otherwise maybe just record you or someone you know that develops to code. Take some macro and micro shots of them coding, printing out their information in the console/gui.

Hope this helps, Ive been a lurker for 6 years on multiple forums, for once i thought i might contribute to the greater good?