"ANI the Animator"(C)1994-97 John Calder Version 1.5 of 13th June, 1997 Box 68-053, Auckland 1 NEW ZEALAND EMAIL: jcalder@aggs.school.nz This version of "ani.exe" with example movies is freely shared "PostcardWare". There is no time limit for trying it out and the paying of money to me for a "registered version" is optional, and is rewarded by my supplying a higher level program and extra service. Do "pay" for it in kind by sending me postcards, letters or email making comments, suggestions or notes on your use of it. Better still, send me one or more movies for circulation to other users of "Ani" and for my film festival etc "Best of Ani" movie collection project. Although free, I reserve my copyright on "Ani". This means: (1) Don't go selling it on, except for a small handling fee as is common with shareware dealers. If it's good enough for me to give it away, it's good enough for everyone else to. (2) Don't go changing it to lose the introduction messages or take my name off it. It may not make much money but I do want the ego points! And I don't want anyone else exploiting my work and passing it off as their own. Usual sort of disclaimer: I have taken all care to make a well- behaved programme, well tested on a variety of machines, but I cannot be held responsible for how it runs on yours. Acknowledgement - the LHA Compression method used here to store movies on floppy disk, is Copyright "Yoshi", Haruyasu Yoshizaki. See included file LHA.TXT for background info on Yoshi's compression methods and conditions for commercial use. Improvements for version 1.5 * Movie compression method is now well-behaved under Windows 95. We were getting cases of compression runs needing to be prodded with a mouse click to get them started and needing to be manually closed off when finished. It should now be all automatic again. * Compressed files can now be saved to or opened from the hard drive as well as your floppy drive. This makes sending/receiving movies over networks or the Internet much easier. * You can type text in a range of 16 colours, not just white! See the extra colour options box when you click on Text/Titles. * Improved reliability of the ClCopy and Jump buttons for making use of the clipboard and through it piggy backing on to other graphics and drawing programs. CONTENTS ======== 1 ........ about Movie Animation 2 ........ Startup 3 ........ Quick Introduction 4 ........ Instructions in more detail - geometries - modes - example helpmovies - clipboard: jump, clcopy, paste - saving movies to floppy disk 5 ........ Playback Screen 6 ........ Hints and tips 7 ........ about ANI and me - the art ideas behind ANI 8 ........ Technical ideas behind ANI ================================================================ SECTION 1 about Movie Animation ================================= Often seen as "cartoons", but animation covers a wide range of other movie-making styles. IF * you look at a series of images, one at a time * AND the images change quickly enough, like at a speed of 12 frames per second as used in this programme. * AND the images change in a continuing way THEN your eye sees this as a movie. For my "ANI the Animator" programme, I've kept the drawing system simple to leave your computer disk free to store a useful number of frames, up to 5000 on the kinds of disks we now see in 1995. "ANI" also follows the way I teach my film-making classes. I get my students doing simple drawings to concentrate on learning about movement, even when they are working in the traditional way with paper, pens and movie cameras. LEARN BY DOING I hope most of the controls are well enough labelled for you to get started on simple animation. A good way to learn is by making little test movies that are very simple, eg moving dots, and experimenting with the controls as you go. Click on "Help" to display much of the text in this booklet. ================================================================== SECTION 2 STARTUP ANI starts by giving you the choice of calling up any earlier movie or starting a new one. Safety check- if you start a new project by giving a name already used on disk, you do get a warning message. Movie files supplied with "ANI for Windows" are: "ANIMAL" - a creature with a running movement in 3 drawings, which I keep repeating while I add a flower moving past. "JUPITER" - the planet with movement of orbiting moons. I have added notes to both of these, explaining frame by frame how I made them, so they act as extra help and guides for "ANI". ===================================================================== SECTION 3 Quick Introduction Draw in the DRAWING BOX by moving your mouse with the left button held down. Then press Enter to record the frame. I also provide a NEXT FRAME screen button, but pressing Enter on the keyboard is better because the mouse pointer can then hold its place, so you have it as a starting point for your next drawing. To add titles and other letters and words, first click the mouse RIGHT button to mark the place, then type them in. I've set up the commands I use most as click-buttons under the picture boxes. Extras like choice of colour or pen size appear when you click for them. More advanced drawing and control tricks come from the menu along the top of the screen. If making circles, lines or boxes, an EXIT button will appear. It gives you a quick return to mouse-as-pen drawing. You can go back to earlier frames and add to them. Use the controls under the Drawing Box for this. The number button returns you to working on your last frame. The Delete button or key deletes the frame showing in the Review Box. Playback screen There are 2 Playback sizes. If the big picture is slow or looks wierd, click the SIZE button to run with a smaller picture. ====================================================================== SECTION 4 Instructions - more details Geometries These shapes work by the idea of mouse DRAGGING. To draw a shape, you press the left button to mark where you are starting, and you KEEP YOUR FINGER DOWN while you move to a finishing point, and then and only then do you let go. This is called a DRAG. To help you, the shape will "preview" itself with a dotted line so you can try dragging it all kinds of ways before fixing it by letting go the button. More about the shapes: * LINE - hold down to start and drag to end. * BOX - start and end points are the corners. * CIRCLE start is the centre, drag to set outside. This shape can also be an ellipse (oval). * TEXTURED BOX, CIRCLE fill themselves in with a pattern as you drag. The pattern depends on how fast you drag and what colours and pen size you choose. So have fun experimenting!" Modes A "MODE" is a WAY OF WORKING. In "Ani", the modes are the ways of starting new frames. NEW CLEAR FRAME is the simplest. Each frame starts blank and you draw your picture. But animation often means making small changes, and it is good to be able to save yourself from re-drawing the same things over and over again. So I've given you these other MODES. * COPY AND ALTER ... the previous frame is your starting picture. * MAKE BACKGROUND .. the frame showing becomes the starting picture for new frames. * WORKOVER .. your starting pictures come from a series of frames from earlier in the movie. Before clicking WORKOVER, you first need to set the REVIEW box to the first frame of the series you want to add to. These modes are only for making NEW frames. Going back over old frames is a different way of working and the above "modes" automatically switch off until you get back to making new frames. Example HelpMovies Animated Movies are a very effective presentation medium so I've made up some of ANI's HELP system as example movies with notes explaining how they are done. * "ANIMAL" shows use of the "Copy and Alter" and "Workover" modes in a movie of a running animal. * "JUPITER" shows use of "Geometries", Pen Colour Black for rubbing out sketch lines and use of a Background. To open an Example HelpMovie, click on FILE up at the top left and then on OPEN NEW MOVIE. The STARTUP screen appears and you click on the 2nd choice (choice b.) which is "LOAD EXISTING MOVIE". Clipboard, Edit, Jump, clCopy, Paste The Clipboard is a spare memory space. The simplest way to use it is to store an interesting frame on it to reuse later, so it can be a 2nd BACKGROUND. But it is more powerful than that because it is shared with all the other programmes in Windows. So you can use other programmes to make or change your frames. You can even bring in scanned photos or frames from live movies if you have that software available. Use the Windows ability to have 2 programmes running at the same time to start ANI, then minimise it, start PAINTBRUSH or IMAGEPRO or whatever, then use ALT-TAB or other Windows methods to move back to ANI. The "Jump" method in ANI does the copy to clipboard and jump to other programme in one step, and pastes the new frame in for you when you come back to ANI. In the other programme, you must still remember to make use of the normal PASTE and COPY methods. Storing "Compressed" movies on a Floppy Disk "Ani" movies in working storage can get very large. That tends to be the nature of computer graphics. But most ""Ani"" artwork can compress very well, sometimes to less than 5 percent of the working size. Under the menu bar heading "File", I provide options for compressing to and un-compressing back from "LHA" files. I've added these methods to make it easier to share and swap movies by over the internet or via floppy disk. If you want to send "Ani" movies by modem, you need to "Compress - Copy" first and then send the movie from the folder you keep "Ani" in, usually "c:\ani". Compressed movie files have the extension ".LZH" Acknowledgement - the LHA Compression method is Copyright "Yoshi", Haruyasu Yoshizaki. See included file LHA.TXT for background info on Yoshi's compression methods. " ==================================================================== SECTION 5 PLAYBACK screen Use the Playback control for: * playing the movie on a clear screen * copying to film or video Speed Ani is setup to run at 9 frames per second, but other choices are available. Video and Film copies The best method is to run ANI movies on an "LCD" colour screen. These screens glow rather than flicker so they copy to film or video just fine. Find these screens on newer LAPTOPS or as DATASHOW screens or projectors. A hint, especially for film, is "the smaller it is, the brighter it is", which means it is best to set up a piece of paper as a small screen just in front of the "datashow" and copy off that. Film copies Straight copying off the common monitor can work OK. It helps to run the movie camera at a slow speed and slow down the computer playback to match. EXAMPLE: Super-8 mm film has a standard speed of 18. Run the camera at 9 which is half-speed. Match this on the computer by halving its speed from 9 to 4.5 EXAMPLE - 16 mm film .. standard speed = 24 A Bolex or Pathe camera can slow down to 8 which is standard speed divided by 3 So match this on the computer with 9 / 3 = 3 Run your animation at a speed of 3 ================================================================== SECTION 6 Hints and tips If you find yourself in the wrong MODE for what you want to do... Changing mode does not help because it won't take effect until the next frame change... So use Copy or Clear controls to help you fix the current frame. IF you want to draw on a white or coloured background... - (1) click on BkColour and select background colour - (2) if needed, select a new drawing colour NOTE - changing background colour will erase what was in the picture before. Use "Paint" as your alternative if you need to keep the picture. If you want to hold an image still for a moment.. eg a TITLE for long enough for people to read.. - make sure you are in COPY AND ALTER mode.. - THEN press [Enter] again and again .. eg 9 times for a 1 second hold ==================================================================== SECTION 7 about ANI and me - the ideas behind ANI I am JOHN CALDER, aged 39 in 1995, teacher, film-maker and tutor in film-making at the ASA School of Art. I see computer programming as a very powerful activity and too important to be left only to computer programmers. I believe people like me, with a wide-ranging creative life and life experience have a worthwhile variety of ideas and approaches to bring to computer systems. The computer designers are presently struggling to make "digital video" work on computers. Just one frame of film coded into numbers for a computer to work with may take up 1 megabyte = 1 million memory spaces, and at up to 25 frames needed for 1 second, today's "Multimedia" systems are just managing to handle a limited kind of video. But I know systems are improving and I look forward to future systems where I will be able to edit on a "picture processor" that can "cut" and "paste" movie moments and scenes with the same kind of creative opening out that a word processor gives to writing. I want to start NOW (!!) and while video images are too much for any computer I can get near, drawn images for animation can be a lot simpler. Depending on your WIndows setup, ANI frames are each 21K or 42K, and even 386 systems can usefully handle animation with simple pictures of that size. ANI now gives access to a new creative method and we can use ANI as "mini-video" to work out some approaches so we'll have a head start on handling full-on computer video as we get future access to it. My earlier ANI for DOS has frames of only 3kB, can run even on the old "XT" and "286" computers. Compared to other computer animation systems I have seen, ANI is simpler on the drawing side, but gives the full-on movement from the human original mark that film animation does. Most importantly, it is now something our students are actually using rather than just reading about. I'm a fan of artist Len Lye who made amazing animated movies with minimal drawings moving in incredible ways. I've created ANI to help us work along his lines which means having fun "making doodles" and letting them "kick around a bit" ==================================================================== SECTION 8 - Technical Discussion ANI is written using Microsoft "Visual Basic for Windows". Each frame is a "Bitmap" picture, which is the simplest kind of Windows picture file. Frame size is 21K on 16-colour setups and 42K with 256-colour or more. ANI runs most efficiently on screens set up as 16-colour and 640 x 480 pixels, which is the simplest common Windows setup. I have read that Windows 95 can give each programme its own setup quite easily, which would be great, but I haven't seen this in action yet. Frames are named 0001.bmp 0002.bmp ... with an administration programme with the name of the movie followed by ".ani" eg animal.ani Each movie exists as a directory, so an example disk structure is: Directories Files c: ani animal 0001.bmp, 0002.bmp, ... 0021.bmp, animal.ani jupiter 0001.bmp, 0002.bmp, ... 0030.bmp, jupiter.ani noname 0001.bmp, noname.bmp peter 0001.bmp, 0002.bmp, ... 1244.bmp, peter.ani sue 0001.bmp, 0002.bmp, ... 0126.bmp, sue.ani The ".ani" files are simple text files that you can open and look at with the Windows "notepad" programme or with any word processor. The first item is the number of frames. If you should ever have a "crash", like a power cut, when you are in the middle of work on a movie, you may find a lot of your new frames seem to be lost when you get going again. Usually the frames are OK, but the ".ani" file missed out on getting the correct new number of frames written in. So open it up and change it if you have such a problem. Technical Discussion - File management and file compression =========================================================== ANI movies can be big. An "Epic" of up to 2 mins long can occupy 10meg of disk. Most modern machines usually have enough disk space for this to be no problem, but if you are working on several movie projects, or you are dealing with School Computers used by a large number of kids, you may wonder where all the megabytes went! I am now using the LHA compression program by Yoshi to compress ANI movies on to floppy disk. See end of Section 4 for more on this, or, from within ANI, click on the 1st menu heading "File" to display "Compress" options which automatically run LHA for you. ANI loves "DoubleSpace" The easiest way to make ANI more efficient is to use it in a "stacked", or "compressed" drive. Software to do this comes with MS-DOS 6 . I don't know yet if Windows 95 has it. Several independent companies also sell such software. Because of the nature of "bitmap" pictures, ANI works exceptionally well with "DoubleSpace". Depending on drawing style, the space gain can be up to 10 times rather than just "double". And ANI can go faster too. On my old 386-DX40, large ANI movies improve their max speed from 6 to 18 frames per second. So if you already have a "compressed" drive, put ANI into it, and enjoy the advantage. But don't compress your drive just to improve ANI, because you may slow down some of your other programs. It is possible, but tricky, to compress part of your drive for ANI. For the expert readers, who would shake their heads in disbelief reading this, I had better explain some more. "DoubleSpace" is often looked down on as an evolutionary dead end in personal computing. For most disk files it gives only a small saving in space at the cost of slowing down the system. It also had a bad history of being the subject of copyright battles, and then to top it all off, soon after it was invented, the average hard drive shot up in size from 100 Meg to 540 Meg and beyond, rather doing away with the need for it. Regard ANI as a special case that should inspire you to pull this wierd little creature out of its forgotten corner and give it a worthwhile blast. So why does ANI defy conventional logic and go faster? My guess is that, sure, the processor chip gets extra workload coding and decoding compressed files, but the results are so small that they move on and off the disk 10 times as fast and that more than makes up for the processor delay. Also, I discover that the compression effect carries on over into "SMARTDRIVE", which ANI uses, so that has the effect of suddenly giving your computer 10 to 20 Meg of extra RAM !!! Wow! Where to get Shareware ====================== Anyone who has some is asked to pass it around, and that includes me of course. I have made a point of collecting and testing educational shareware and making my results and the best of what I have found available to my fellow teachers. So I am a source myself.. ALSO (in New Zealand) SHARE WAREHOUSE Wellington ph (04) 477 3535 SIMPLY SHAREWARE Masterton ph (06) 378 9915 TRYSOFT Auckland (09) 479 4635 , Box 35-107, Browns Bay OTHER SOFTWARE I have written ============================= All available as Shareware, some as Freeware. Pick them up off bulletin boards or mail order from me for $6. ANI for DOS Simpler version of ANI uses less disk space and can run on older, humbler, cheaper computers. IMAGEX4 Movie animation by Math methods rather than drawing. ACTIVEMATHS Collection of Maths learning programmes for students of about ages 14 - 17. Most of my customers so far are younger students wanting to extend themselves. ESLBASE database system for administration needs of an ESOL department in a NZ High School. BOOKBASE, FILMBASE ... database systems developed from ESLBASE. Yes, I know the world is full of database software! But these work well even on low-end computers and are designed to be easy to use for my computer-avoiding fellow teachers. ==============END of File ==========================================