Desktop Video News and Reviews

Doug Polk
August 1995

Done any doodling lately? Chances are, you have. Done any animation? I doubt it! Doodling is to animation what Legos are to housing developments. First you have to scale up your doodle to a clean, crisp image. Then you have to do it over and over again, with slight, subtle differences. That over-and-over part is the killer. It's called tweening, short for in-betweening, and it takes a sweatshop full of underpaid animators to pull it off. There are only a handful of good animation houses on the entire planet, and they shroud their methods in secrecy. The little guy just can't compete.

That was the story until personal computers came of age. A typical PC today has a 16-bit graphics card with resolutions that would shame a TV and enough raw horsepower to equal your own room full of tireless tweeners. Now is the time to look at adding some animated sizzle to your videos.

Eye-catching animation is always in great demand. Try to find a commercial on TV today that doesn't have some kind of animation. And the range of animation techniques is stretching to include claymation, 3D graphics, computer-enhanced 2D graphics, stop motion, go motion, computer-controlled cameras, motion analysis, rotoscoping, morphing, warping and more! If you can't do something fun with these toys, maybe you should find another sandbox to play in.

About ten years ago, there weren't any decent animation products available for any home computer platform. Then along came Macromedia's Director for the Macintosh.

As you might imagine, it has evolved quite a bit since then. It's a powerful tool, and animation is only one of its talents. Director can stitch together an interactive presentation with sight, sound and buttons. It even includes its own language (called Lingo) that helps you program games of great complexity.

On the animation front, Director can tween positions. This means that you can place a dog at the left edge in frame one and at the right edge in frame twenty. Then Director will automatically slide the dog smoothly across the screen. This is great for a roller-skating dog. But if the dog is an animation cycle, say six frames for a complete stride, then a special version of tweening can make the dog walk convincingly across the screen.

There is even a limited amount of object tweening, or warping, that you can apply to an object. That means you can smoothly squash a rubber ball from a circle to an oval. One of Director's many strengths is cross-platform compatibility, so you don't have to double your effort to make your final product playable on a Mac or PC.

Over the years, Director has become an incredibly complex program. This makes it a delight for multimedia development. Unfortunately, its basic animation tools have not changed that much in ten years. The painting tools are still pretty rudimentary, so most users compose their artwork in other paint programs and then import them into Director.

One of those paint programs is Painter 3 from Fractal Designs. Here's a paint program that will satisfy the traditional artist like no other. This feature-laden program lets you paint with brushes that leave dimensional-looking oil-paint strokes, realistic charcoal marks or wet-looking watercolors. Artists sometimes have a hard time adjusting to the relatively left-brain world of computers, but Painter 3 provides a smooth transition, letting artists work just like they would with real media.

Painter 3 has recently added animation in the form of support for numbered Picts and QuickTime movies (both of which are Macintosh graphics formats). When you load a movie, you can specify the number of layers of onion-skin you want. This is a nice feature that allows you to see the frames before or after the current frame as if you were looking through a translucent onion skin. This is helpful for registration and comparing the motion from frame to frame.

Another terrific aid to the animator is the tracing paper feature of Painter 3. It allows you to trace over the successive images of a video to study (and copy) the motions. You can then use any of the art tools available on your computer to modify these images and make them look like they were hand-drawn. This kind of animation is called rotoscoping, and it's one of the best-kept secrets of animation.

Disney animators have used (and continue to use) these motion studies to give their animations realistic motion, but they always swore that straight rotoscoping was a cheat that their cartoonists never used. In fact, it seems highly likely that Disney animators used rotoscoping rather extensively for those movies (like Snow White) that used a lot of human animation. It's one thing to make a cartoon mouse hop around the screen. It's quite another to get believable human emotions across.

Far from being a cheat, rotoscoping is probably the best way to learn about motion. It can even be a terrific technique in its own right. The trick is to make it fit in with the rest of the character animation.

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