#2d animation
When I started animating, I used sheets of tracing paper and then, later,
graduated to acetate cels, just like the "real" guys do. The difference is
that I used a Super 8 camera with its macro lens and animated in a 2×3 inch
square, which is small enough to allow you to churn out a lot of frames.
Using Disney Animation Studio, I plan my characters so that the
unmoving parts are copied numerous times and then I draw in the
motion for the parts that I want. In other words, if I want a
talking head on an unmoving body, I make about 15 copies of the body
that I've drawn and then I concentrate on drawing the different head
positions.
This is, of course, not much better than the old "limited animation"
that was typical of the old Saturday morning cartoons, but HEY, what
do you expect from a one-man animating team?
Scenes have to be carefully planned. I create a series of raw scenes
in Pencil-Test portion and then combine them in Deluxe Paint IV using
brushes and animbrushes. Then I color the scenes in Deluxe Paint and
paste them over a background(s).
I go back into Disney to the pencil test mode to create a template
for a soundtrack. The two-color pencil test images are a blurred
mess, but you can see enough to synch your sounds. Then I figure
out which order to put the frames for my final .anim file and which
frames to trigger each sound. I rarely keep my final animation as a
.cfast file. .Cfast files are too slow and too big. So, I convert to
an anim file and play it with The Director.
Most of my stuff is the type of animation that Disney's software
excels at. I do mainly comedy shorts for the purpose of orienting
new medical students and medical residents in training. (I'm a
physician in Internal Medicine/Primary Care).
You're probably right about needing a new chip or something for my
Amiga. I've got one of the first Amiga 3000's and still use the
Hard- disk based operating system. I think that I don't even have
much of a ROM-based operating system. I should upgrade and was
promised a free ROM-based upgrade to the final operating system when
I bought the machine, but Commodore never followed through. I've
written letters and griped to my dealer, but never had anyone
respond. It's probably just as well. My machine works pretty well
as it is and I'm happy with it and the last thing I want is to drop
it off in some shop where some klutz is going to start poking around
in it and make it do some other quirky thing. Upgrading the OS has
been no problem, since the Hard-disk system updates have been easy to
acquire.
Anyway, I'm probably going to get a 4000 if Commodore can stay in
business long enough to let me buy one. It seems to me like the
Toaster 4000 may have saved the Amiga for a while, based on some of
my trips to the newstand. I would gladly convert to a PC based
system, but the bottom line is that the PC STILL does not do what I
need to have done in my animations: Play back, at an acceptable
speed, high resolution animations that allow me to frame-trigger
sounds so that I can dump them to videotape in real time.
I'm not too familiar with AMOS. Will it let you write scripts to
play animations with frame-triggered sounds? It seems like Scala is
the way to go with the 4000, though I'm bummed that AGA animations
won't play in overscan with it, though my use of AGA modes will
likely be limited… I'm worried that all of my Director animations
in their conventional modes won't work on a 4000. The Director had a
lot of bugs in the early editions. Product support is superb,
though, and everytime I found a bug in the software, Keith Doyle
squashed it and uploaded corrected modules for me. I really
appreciate the Director and will miss it if its disappearing.