El Blanco - Digital Dreams

In this series, I'm planning on getting down to the excruciating details in the reorchestration, and hopefully going over some scene music history. But before I do that, let's start at a high-level. Even before putting down a single note, we needed to set some constraints, define the scope of the project so I knew what big of a box I had to work with.

Fulcrum usually works in 4k, so we're used to tight spaces. 8k seemed almost like a vast luxury in comparison. In a 4k production, we usually have to try to fit the music under 2k (sometimes way under). This includes all of the notes, all of the instruments and the soft synth that produces the music. It may sound impossible, but the demoscene is known for being almost insanely resourceful and some awesome coders have developed and released some incredible tooling that makes this almost bearable.

For an 8k production, it seemed reasonable to target around 4k for the music, 4k for the code. It turns out this budget estimate was pretty good.

For our 4k productions, we've almost always relied on two music production toolchains:

1 - 4klang - a stack-based softsynth by Gopher and pOWL of Alctatraz. It produces lush, rich sounds, great percussion instruments, and is almost impossible to figure out. Our musicians all love how it sounds, we all hate working with it. It really needs a comprehensive tutorial. One other downside, the instrument definitions make the overall music take up more space than our #2 choice.

2 - Clinkster - an FM-style softsynth by Blueberry of the Loonies that produces surprisingly good leads and pads, not as great sounding percussion (a problem with most FM synths) but is reasonably easy to work with once you understand FM synth basics. It's also well documented and comes with a great set of testing tools so the musician doesn't have to bother the coder as much. It also tends to produce slightly smaller music in the final production. However, it sounds a little less lush than 4klang and I've never ended up completely satisfied with the final result.

Having had good success with it in the past, for this production we decided to use Clinkster.

That set we should be good to go right? After all, we're dealing with an 8k production here, twice as much space! We can be lazy right? Wrong! Second Reality is a 16 minute long, 23-part production. The music is so complex it took two composers to write it. So size still matters, and size will become our focus for the rest of this series.

Right off the bat, Seven figured we needed to make a big cut. Something that most people wouldn't really miss, wasn't an effect, and artistically wouldn't change the overall meaning of the production. Second reality, while 16 minutes long, is 7 minutes of end-credits.

But cutting that out, we can get rid of about 40% of the music right off the bat.

The question we have yet to answer is, is that 40% of the overall bytes in the music?

<Prev. Part 1 - Part 3 Next>

1. Are we crazy?

2. Microscope

3. Constraints and Expenses and Pooping Parties

4. Origins

5. Entropy

6. Let's Talk Turkey

7. Getting Dirty

8. Knotty Knotes

9. Forgotten Magic

10. Pots and Pans

11. Your Left, Your Left

12. Running into a Brick Wall While Falling off a Cliff

13. Cutting Yourself

14. In Case of Emergency, Break Things

15. Pressure Cooker

16. Full Contact Knife Limbo

17. Options
Add. Are my ears broken?

The demoscene is an amazing, vibrant, highly technical art movement with a surprisingly long history. Like any art movement, great works come out from time to time. Just like every painter needs to be familiar with the Mona Lisa and know who Jackson Pollock is, the demoscene's iconic works are important viewing for anybody who wants to be part of the scene. Among them, one of the most famous, and most important, is Second Reality [1] by Future Crew. It's inspired thousands of people through its clever effects, design and soundtrack to develop artistic and technical skills needed to compete and contribute to the demoscene. The last major production by Future Crew, when it was released in 1993 (the same year as the first Web Browser), it absolutely blew people away and took 1st in the then biggest demoscene competition ever, Assembly '93.

Even though this all happened at a competition in a small country in Northern Europe, it sent shockwaves around the world (at least the world's technical communities). Spread via bulletin boards and early Internet connections, it showed what was actually graphically, musically and technically possible with PCs (which had just finally caught up to what the Amiga could do). Today, more than 20 years later, when computers are vastly more powerful, it's still celebrated in media far outside the demoscene community.

The 20th anniversary of Second Reality happened in 2013. That year, in celebration, the source code, art assets and music were released into the Public Domain. Since then (and even before then to be honest), it's been remade in homage and tribute several times for different platforms. To say that this demo is loved would be an understatement. More importantly, as the demoscene continues to grow and change and go through generational shifts (some sceners are now bringing their children to scene parties), this revisitation of our shared history is becoming more and more important as we build and maintain our unique artistic heritage and culture.

Among all the ports and remixes, many have been playful, or have tried to replicate the demo on older hardware, showing what might have been possible on pre-1993 hardware given the right combination of artistic vision and skill. Along those lines, my group, Fulcrum, decided this year to try to recreate it for the Revision 2015 8k competition. We wanted to ask the question, would Second Reality be possible with 2015 hardware, but packed in 8,192 bytes?

At first I thought our group coder, Seven, was a little bit mad. We'd competed and done relatively well in the ultra restrictive 4k and 8k competition categories, but those were usually fairly minimal productions -- a couple of minutes of a few interesting scenes and a thin soundtrack behind it.

Fitting Second Reality into the equivalent of two pages of text seemed impossible. But there's no way to know until you try. Here's Seven's writeup on the code-side of things. The end of a few months of feverish work was indeed a reasonable approximation of Second Reality, done on modern hardware, and within 8k -- something that we're incredibly proud of. We took 2nd place, a respectable showing in a very competitive category. Sure some things had to be cut, and the production is full of the kind of compromises you'd expect shrinking a massive artistic production down by 300x, but it's all basically there.

My part in all of this was the music. And the soundtrack for the demo is as iconic and loved as the visuals. I've been writing music off and on since 1992, and this was among the most challenging productions I've ever tried, and I had the score already done for me by the amazing Skaven and Purple Motion! I've had some interest in how we were able to squeeze the production down to 8k, and thought I can't talk for the coding side and the amazing work Seven put into it, I thought it would be fun to capture what it was like reorchestrating one of the most iconic pieces of music in demoscene history in order to fit it into just a few thousand bytes.

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