CompuServe Thread

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.