Bad Astronomy

Make It So, Make It So, Make It So

Let it snow
I sense a disturbance in the Force.

Photo by Paramount Pictures (from the video) / Theresa Knott (OpenClipArt) / Phil Plait

If you’re a nerd (and you read my blog, so: guilty) then you may have already seen this, but it’s worth making sure anyway:

Brilliant! And it must have taken a lot of work.

… but the programmer in me has to wonder. If you had a time-tagged script, and all the episodes of a TV show online, you could then write a program that would do this for you. Enter the lyrics for a song, and it will search the script to find spoken dialogue to match the words in the lyrics. When it finds multiple choices for a word (common words will come up many times) it can give you the choice of which one to use. It would then automatically grab the clips from the video using the time tags, string them together, and output a continuous video like the one above. You’d probably have to fiddle with timing before and after each word and phrase, but that’s still way easier than doing it all by hand.

Hmmmm. If you actually input the music to the song, the program could even do a frequency analysis and then autotune the dialogue to match the pitch! Then you really would hear Picard singing this song.

OK, BABloggees… make this so. I’ll be magnanimous, and only ask for a 1% intellectual property fee for the idea. You can then donate it to CosmoQuest.

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