home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- ATF Agility by Eric Schwartz
-
- This Aerotoon animation requires one megabyte of memory to run. It was
- created with the following programs.
-
- Disney Animation Studio - Animation, color, and preliminary production
- DeluxePaint III - Touch-up and Anim-standardizing
- Animation Station - final timing, color, and sound synching
-
- The History of ATF Agility:
-
- While attending my freshman year at the Columbus College of Art and
- Design, I came up with the idea for this animation, My father had recently
- purchased the Disney Animation studio, and, due to the nature of my
- animation idea, I chose the fast pageflipping Disney studio other than my
- usual workhorse, Moviesetter, which,from the nature of its animation
- system and Hardware/software limitations, can only do about 8-10 frames
- per second. ATF Agility was fully animated, with many more drawings per
- second than one of my Moviesetter works, which blits still and animated
- brushes around the screen. Disney worked wonderfully. Its onion skin
- feature greatly speeded up production. Disney also promises frame-synched
- sound, and timing and pallete changes in mid-animation, just like
- Moviesetter. All those features work beautifully, if you're willing to
- learn the language of the slightly-esoteric exposure sheet module, But
- these features are only available when you use Disney's proprietary CFAST
- animation file format. No biggie, I thought, I'm used to that
- (Moviesetter's proprietary too), and I would get a lot of benefits that a
- garden variety ANIM cant do. I colored the Animation in Disney's
- Ink'n'Paint module, which could use a LOT more capability, so I could keep
- with the beautiful, clever CFAST format, Right? HAH!!
- The final CFAST file saved out at 880K for a 22 second, 15 fps, 8-color
- animation - Just slightly bigger than a disk. because I had no Hard drive,
- I compressed the file and wrote a script to decompress upon running.
- Hardly a good solution; the overhead caused it to require 2.5 megs to run
- properly from a floppy, or 1.5 and an ASSIGN command to run from a hard
- drive. This was November of 1990. The situation didn't change for a while.
- June 1991. I purchased Progressive Peripherals' Animation Station, Which
- promised some of the abilites of the Disney program using standard ANIMs
- I resaved the CFAST file as an ANIM-5. 432k - Quite an improvement over
- 880k, Cfast files are just plain huge. Animation Station and its
- Animplayer allow Pallete changes during an animation, Timing changes for
- holds on frames without adding duplicate frames, and digitised sound
- synching via a script file that works exactly like a Sculpt/Movie sound
- script. It has its share of limitations and problems, (My Animation
- Station seems to know the GURU personally) but it works, The New ATF
- Agility runs nearly identically to the original version. Takes up only a
- bit more than half a disk including player program. only requires 1-meg,
- and can run from any directory. You can even load it into Dpaint and check
- it out, but youll probably lose the fringe benefits.
-
- Eric Schwartz
-
- E.S. Productions
- P.O. Box 292684
- Kettering, OH 45429-0684
-