Zoetrope Deadhead Rif
A couple of S.F. Bay Areans have a cable new show called "Dead Head TV" that is
cablecast nationwide to more than 20 cities. The show features thoughtful
interviews with deadheads, up-to-date information about the band, reviews and
highlights of recent tours, interviews with the band and "family" members, and
topics of general interest to deadheads. It's a professionally produced show,
and the few I've seen have been up-beat and interesting. I volunteered to do
their opening title sequence. It's a 30- second Zoetrope animation on my Amiga
1000, featuring color cycling, an infinite-plane/roses terrain, with the
ubiquitous hippie-bus traversing the scene and stopping at a psychedelic TV,
lightning-blasted into spewing out titles. Pretty far out, no? Anyway, those
inclined (and cable connected) can catch it starting next Thursday, the 12th,
in Oakland, CA @ 8:30 pm and San Rafael, CA @ 9:30 pm; and Durham, NC @ 5:30
pm. Check your cable listings for the dates and times for these locations: Los
Altos, Cupertino, Long Beach, Santa Monica, San Diego, and Torrance CA;
Bloomington IN; East Orange and Passaic NJ; Cleveland and Columbus OH; Eugene
OR and Nashville TN. More cities are planned, so check your cable listing.
This is my first animation with Zoetrope (or anything else) and it was a lot of
fun. I made one, as a "comp," and then made the final one incorporating the
necessary changes. I put in 40 hours to conceive, discuss, script, scan
appropriate art, do lightning bolt illustrations, create effects, and output
onto consumer VHS. Again, this included learning Zoetrope! Not bad. The
manual is easy to use, with helpful tutorials. The biggest problem was lack of
overscan, (are you listening, Antic?), but the DH-TV producers were wow-ed
enough by the animation's "look" to dismiss that. I'm lucky to have a hard
drive and 4 megs of ram, for this is a 1.6 meg animation. To work on it, I had
to break it into two halves, as Zoetrope wouldn't load it all. When I play it,
I use "quickrif rif1 + rif2", from the CLI (no background programs), and voila,
30 seconds of psyche-deadhead-lics. Hope some of you can