tl;dr I averaged every episode of That 70’s Show into a single video

A couple of weeks ago I was hanging out with my buddy and we were going to watch some TV. I was making a pitch for my new favorite show Rick & Morty which we couldn’t find using the PS3 internet browser. We did however find excellent video syncing Rick and Morty clips with Eminem’s Rap God.

One good YouTube find is never enough though so as soon as the video finished we eagerly checked the user’s other videos and thats when we stumbled upon this gem:

After watching a bit too much of ‘Every episode of Friends simultaneously’ I went looking for two things of which I found neither. Maybe I live in too much of a software bubble but I was genuinely surprised when I couldn’t find a link to the code used to make the video. I was equally surprised that this was the only video of its kind that I could find.

And thats how this project got started - I set out to create a script that would let me average all the episodes of any show into a new video. I wrote a script in python and opencv to do the work and then I picked That 70’s Show as my first test (I would have preferred Seinfeld but I don’t have it). That 70’s Show is a pretty good candidate - my main hypothesis was that shows that re-use the same locations frequently will be more interesting.

I am pretty pleased with the results! It’s pretty fun to watch and you can definitely pick out distinct patterns in how they frame shots and recognize scenes like the car from the opening credits (at ~2 minutes in). If I’d ever taken a course in film I’m sure I’d have some more intelligent things to say.

I also made this video where I ramp up to the average adding a new episode every 30 frames or around 1 second. So for the first second you’re only watching 1 episode then 2, 3 etc: