I ran across an absolutely bananas Twitter account the other week, Daily Dunkaccino.
The account posts one remix of “Dunkaccino” every day. Dunkaccino, which I had neither heard of nor seen prior to finding this account, is a very strange fake commercial for Dunkin Donuts, starring Al Pacino. For more info, see the Know Your Meme page on it.
After laughing my face off for longer than I’d care to admit, I decided to submit a remix and see if I could make it onto the feed. I used my Emojisaic script to convert the entire thing into pure emojis, and then laced the audio back in with FFMPEG.
I submitted it to the Daily Dunk and was featured within a matter of days. Here’s the post with my video:
Dunkaccino but made out of emojis (by @nah_solo) pic.twitter.com/swBglZiIjG
— Daily Dunkaccino (@DailyDunkaccino) January 23, 2021
The bad news: it looks like garbage! And I don’t have a better copy!
The first thing–it looking like garbage–is Twitter’s fault. The original files generated by Emojisaic were pixel-perfect, lossless PNG images, stitched together into a lossless video file. This is, apparently, not the kind of thing Twitter has optimized for in their video compression algorithm. But don’t take my word for it:
this counts as aggravated assault
— o.o (@LanoomAES) January 23, 2021
My fucking eyes.
— Aaron Corona (@AaronCo101) January 23, 2021
THIS IS SO PAINFUL TOO LOOK AG
— Melgore (@Melgore_) January 23, 2021
The second part, not having a higher quality file, is my bad. I did this whole thing as a throwaway project, a silly remix for a meme page, in about an evening, and left the script running overnight to generate all the images. I have an old laptop with limited onboard storage, so once I submitted the file to the Daily Dunk page I deleted it from my local machine. Bummer, because now it only exists in a terribly compressed form.