NOTE: I originally entered this file in 2006 to SpookyMix Plus at DDRExtreme.co.uk (now DDREvolved.com). Below is the original readme that was included at that time, decoded from the binary code I originally submitted it in :)

--Xythar (gmmazz@hotmail.com)

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Robot by Do As Infinity
(#3 in the D-A-I Series)

Stepped by Xythar

Firstly, congratulations on being one of probably about 2 people who will bother to decode this readme! :) I'm not even sure why I'm bothering to type the rest of this considering how many people will read it, but yeah.

(If this is showing up all as one big paragraph in the converter you used, check the page source and copy from there. It should be correct in that... I don't want to put br tags everywhere in here so it renders properly in HTML because that looks nasty in Notepad.)

This song is from Do As Infinity's final album, Need Your Love (yeah, I've gone straight from the 2nd to the last, and will go back to the first soon enough, you might find... :P). The song itself isn't that spooky, but the video sure is! (I hadn't thought this song was a single, but it seems to have a video anyway, so okay). It's pretty out of the ordinary for a Do As Infinity video, most of them are pretty standard and contain stuff like "the band actually performing the song". Whereas in this one you see some kind of creepy narrative plus a series of cameos by lead singer Tomiko Van. Well, whatever. (The guy has nothing to do with the band that I know of, I guess he's just an actor they got for this video)

I was aiming to keep in as much as the video as I could for this, since it doesn't make as much sense unless you see the whole narrative (about things repeating and then general weirdness). To this end, the file is really long (like 2:29 or so). Sorry. This is about as short as I could get it and still have the full effect. On the other hand, I did do quite the complex editing job on the video to fit 4:17 of video into 2:29 of stepfile while retaining all scenes (except the opening bit which had no music anyway). This was challenging, I had to cut down on a lot of ultimately inconsequential details and speed up the ending a bit just to fit it all in... I used Premiere for this, as you can tell because the end part looks stupid but by that point I was sick of it and didn't feel like redoing. I'm pretty happy with the editing on the rest, tho - I managed to cut around a minute of footage out while keeping everything important in there. Stuff like the slow pan-up after he picks up the ring gets cut and you barely even notice unless you're familiar with the original... but I digress.

I guess this is the part where I'm meant to talk about my steps, but there's not much to say. They all basically just go to the music. I've done better, but these are alright. Light has offbeats but it's still easy enough to be a 3, I think... there's more than 1 foot difference between it and standard (a 5), IMO. Heavy is an easy 8 due to 16th usage.

I made the graphics in Photoshop (from scratch!) based on the 'robot' theme. What's more, I decided to ride the very cutting edge of simfile technology and make an animated banner too (basically I scrolled up the background text layer in ImageReady and tweened it over a bunch of frames, exported frames to PNGs, loaded them in VirtualDub and saved as a compressed avi). Yeah, you can use avis as banners... cool, huh? It seems to play too quickly in SM4 however which annoys me to no end. Oh well. I'll be interested in seeing if this works properly on everyone's computers, it's a little experiment of mine. I'm hoping old versions of SM such as 3.0 final will fallback to the still image that I included as well rather than omitting the banner entirely.

Lyrics are from:

http://www.globemoon.net/dai/lyrics/robot_trans.html

I put that credit in the lrc file itself as well since I didn't feel it was entirely ethical to put credit in a coded readme (in fact that's part of the reason I did the graphics entirely myself instead of looking for something).

Thanks to the usual people, shoutout to DDRExtreme.co.uk crew =)

--Xythar
