pouët.net

If you have to introduce demos to someone (boy, girl, from 4 years old to 94?)... which demo you will choose?

hyperventilation.

What a stupid question. It's like asking"If you had to cook for someone, no matter what gender, age or ethnicity, what would you cook?".

Scope it down.

At first I make clear, what fits in 4k for "normal" people and then I show them elevated at first.

just using the youtube link to just watch a recording…

Then one of my Favorite Demos Sounds/gfx are those two:

Wrath by Matt Current Assembly 2009
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL7NbnaAT7Q

Chaos Theory - a 64k intro by Conspiracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOKE8vcf9w4


and then to show them whats possible on "old" hardware, I show always
Elude – We come in peace – An Amiga Intro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3cthIdKUMc


If you want to know some effects, that would be a good explaining video:

YouShould by Haujobb [HD] - Evoke 2010 Invitation – 64k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3CbdiEwUDY

just my 2 cents

I've been doing a lot of this recently. I'll just add a couple of suggestions...

Numb Res is a good recent one to show the cutting edge. People can identify with the music, and it's a nice balance between showing off the effect and doing so in an aesthetically pleasing way.

My secret weapon, though, is The Popular Demo. I run the executable on my feeble little Asus netbook. It runs like butter with almost no slowdown. And then you get two reactions: "You mean.. that runs on your crappy netbook?!" (It does!) and "Wait.. what do you mean that's 10 years old?!" It's always a hit.

Oh, and I try to throw in a couple of minutes of any old Amiga, ST or C64 cracktro via Youtube or an emulator to show people where we came from. (And to give an excuse to do the whole 'where chip music came from' thing...)

audience matters!!

Are they going to get why a demo on a old system is impressive, or a 4k, or will they just react to pretty pictures, especially if you explain to them what 4k means?

Based on the outreach talks kb did here I'd say Elevated or Ceasefire for game devs, Spin for artists . . . to start with.

I've never shown demos to a kid, so I don't know where to start on that.

Saulin Penis on any platform

Also, the Popular Demo is 9 years old (that's still hella old though..)

okkie, I usually say "like 10 years old" - I can never remember the exact year without checking Pouet. Also, re: Saulin Penis - I actually do show people silly wild entries quite often, as part of the explanation of why a big part of the scene is coming together at parties and sharing jokes etc. This one gets quite a lot of play (no, it's not Rob is fucking Jarig).

french fries!

My 6 and 3 years old kids are fans of rupture by Asd

That's an interesting question I cannot answer easilly. Depends on your audience.

In the very very past (and this was still 2000) I was showing retro stuff like Second Reality or more modern stuff of the time like Heaven7 or The Product. Lately I might show some classic ASD or Farbrausch demos among others.

But yes, at least one part of the audience, geeks who don't happen to know the demoscene, show more interest to the 64k intros or less. A demo today could be easilly compared with a prerendered animation found on youtube, many people wouldn't exactly grasp it's realtime. But for intros if you understand the size compared to the visuals and you are a bit of computer geek, you can learn about the realtime and procedural nature of the visuals and sound so not only you might grasp but might want to get more into it.

As for the rest. They might still compare it to a youtube prerendered video. I don't know, show'em something artsy, show'em something. Explain them.

Koneko for girls
Legomania for boys
;)

It's quite difficult to explain things like kilobyte or realtime rendering to people, that have never done anything with a computer. They just will not understand probabely.

I generally just look what I have on my HDD, and pick something out I think they may like.

Some popular choices for me are:
PC: 1995, Chaos Theory, Cloudy (With a chance of lightning), and Frameranger
C64: Edge Of Disgrace, Soiled Legacy, +H2K, Desert Dream.

After that, just random shit mostly. I might show ZX Spectrum, Plus/4, VIC20 (and other platforms) demos on youtube.

Oh, and I suppose I have demos on my phone (android) too, and gameboy.

You are all wrong. It's supposed to be hyperventilation no matter how you twist and turn it!

Masagin maybe?
Otherwise Desert Dream

Glon 243 does the trick for children of all ages. At least my daughter and her friends find it hilarious.

And,.. Hyperventilation for all adults :)

I showed iconoclast from ASD to my computer graphics students when I was a graduate assistant for the lecture. They were impressed ;)

Datsua : heheh thanks :)
for the story Glon 243 stands for Front 242
F+1=G , 242+1=243 :)

Another tip: Don't start to feed your audience with 4k and 64k stuff too much and too early. They might get the impression that size-restricted coding is the main motive of the demoscene and when you show them a normal x-megabyte demo, you're going to hear "Is that 64k?" a lot.

I'm doing this for a couple of years now, mainly to people who use their computers for typing in Word and browsing the internet only, but who're interested at least a little bit in electronic music and music videos.

I'm always showing "The Popular Demo" at first, followed by "Elevated". For Elevated I save an empty word document to explain and prove to them that this doc file is bigger than the executable for Elevated. It's always a blast when Elevated starts to run and when they see the beautiful photo alike scenes at first, until the camera begins to move and this fantastic piece of music starts to play. "LifeForce" is my third example for a demo, as it contains so many beautiful scenes and different styles of music.

My secret weapon is "sts-02: Electric Kool-Aid" for people who like pumping beats and perfectly fitting visuals.

Also on my list (if people want to see more): Frameranger (for those who're interested in video games), fr-043: rove (because of the music), Stargazer (for showing typical demo effects) and so on...

Stargazer! yes!

And Frameranger worked well for a general audience at a demoshow we did last spring. I remember there was a young boy, couldn't be older than eight, who was absolutely stock still unmoving fixated entranced by it in a way that gave me hope for the future of the scene. : )