A few additional thoughts trickled in while I was generating the artwork for the piece. Those have been assembled here along with some research notes in the hope that those who followed the link in the magazine might find them of use. Believe me, all the good stuff is in the magazine, this is just ancillary material for those that wanted more.
Software issues
Naturally, there
are a host of other applications that will create GIF and Flash format files.
Some with a greater degree of success and some less. Being able to create swf
(flash) format files seems to be a bit of a buzz feature (similar to a buzz
word but dealing with "Hip" software features). Finding the perfect
program for swf creation is difficult. Even the two programs featured in this
article are irritating beyond measure sometimes. Flash (even version 5) is remarkably
unintuitive. Editing sequences is still difficult because of the large numbers
of places one must go to make the simplest of changes to just one little sequence.
Flash 5 has made some considerable improvement in that area but they don't go
far enough. Flash still has a frame-based timeline and that means that if you
choose to change the frame rate, everything has to be re-edited by hand. LiveMotion's
big irritant is that it doesn't keep things as vector. They make all this ballyhoo
about it being able to do flash format files but to do it they seem convert
many of the animation elements to bit maps for no apparent reason! The Flash
file format (swf) is such a wonderful thing that it seems ludicrous that Adobe
would virtually ignore its best feature: small file sizes through use of vector
art. The user seems to have no opportunity to force the program to keep the
elements as vectors. Just plain goofy.
Anyway, enough of the ranting. Suffice to say, even though a software developer claims swf output capability, make sure you check it out for a bit to see just what flavour of swf it is. There are two lower level programs available that do basic swf animation:
eZ-Motion $70 US from Beatware at http://www.beatware.com and
e-Picture Pro, $180 US also from Beatware. I have not tried either of these programs but the spec sheets seem pretty comprehensive. Naturally they don't have anything approaching the capabilities fo Flash, nor do they have the complexity which might be considered a good thing. MacWorld magazine rated them highly. I get the impression that both apps run under Mac or Windows.
GIF animation tools, on the other hand, there are aplenty. Here are some you can check out...
GifBuilder is at http://homepage.mac.com/piguet/gif.html Mac Only
VSE Animation Maker http://vse-online.com/animation-maker/index.html (Macintosh) $20 US
GIF Animator 1.1 http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e8925005/ (Windows) $20.US
GIF Construction set professional 2.0a
http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gifcon.html#introduction (Windows) $20US
and this address http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gcsdemo.html
LiveMotion vs Flash
There is a document
available on the Adobe website that does a reasonable job of comparing LiveMotion
and Flash, one to the other. Now remember this is on the Adobe site, written
by Adobe scribes so you've gotta figure it is going to be heavily weighted in
LiveMotion's favour... which it is. Don't expect it to be fair in that regard.
It isn't. But the document does bring up some interesting points and, for those
of you familiar with Flash, it reminds you of things about Flash that you hate.
Noticeably absent in this chart is any mention of LiveMotion's interactive features
(just 16 pages in the LiveMotion manual) or the interactive features of Flash
(well over 500 pages in the Macromedia Flash manuals). I guess they figured
it would be difficult to put a positive spin on that one! Here's the URL for
the chart:
http://www.adobe.com/products/livemotion/lvmvsflash2.html
In the article I didn’t even mention my favourite application for creating GIF animations. If I need to whip something up I invariably turn to Adobe After Effects. It is so powerful and flexible that few things are a challenge to the program. I'm not that mad about the GIF capabilities of it so I output a series of Pict files and then put them onto different frames of a Fireworks Png document that can then be output as an animated GIF. The major benefit is that I have total control over the colours. Beside that minor point, After Effects is tremendous. Unfortunately it is expensive. Well, there are two versions; $650 for the general version of the program and $1500 for the Production Bundle which features a lot of fancy broadcast style effects. It operates in much the same way as LiveMotion and, in the recently released version, offers swf export as well as a vast array of other formats.
More tips
Keep in mind
that in Flash, all line endings are rounded (unlike PostScript line endings
which give you three different options) If you want to have square line endings,
expand your stroke to be a filled shape in your drawing program first and then
import it into flash as a filled shape.
Graphics
Naturally, some
of the artwork I created for this piece didn't lend itself to appearing in a
magazine. It works here though, so let's get to it. If it doesn't loop, just
click on the rerun button.
Setting up a beat in your sequence can have the effect of ensuring your audience has an expectation of something... you can then play with this expectation by either allowing the expected result or, as in this case, denying it.
You can guarantee your audience will never be bored if you overlap all your actions. Something is appearing as something else disappears. It never stops. The moment your screen goes dead, consider your audience may just drift off to look at other things. Notice how in this sequence I try to keep the animation focused at all times. At any one time there really is only one key point I want the audience looking at.
This image is a perfect example of where an animated GIF is quite successful. The file is abut 20k (which is still rather weighty) but it has a lot of frames in it. In each frame, only a small part of the image is changed. The change between frames is all that is recorded and as a result, you can pack a lot more frames in for little file size gain. Only during the last few frames, when I quickly dissolve to the final image does the file size dramatically increase because the file format needs to record the entire frame as each one is different... hence the need for a fast dissolve.
I made a brief allusion to the multi-plane camera technique in the article. It is an old Disney technique that I think they started to use on Bambi. Different images were painted on successive sheets of glass and then moved in front of the camera at different speeds. You can do your own version to add a greater sense of depth to your animation. Here you can see a simple one in Flash at work. During the sequence, each of the four main components, the mountains and sky, the distant hills, the back row of trees and the foreground trees move by different amounts. The mountains move down and across almost imperceptibly, whereas, the foreground trees move down and across the frame rapidly. Sometimes it takes a little trial and error to get the illusion to work correctly. In this case I wanted to suggest the type of perspective on the scene that could only be achieved with a helicopter.
Personally
While generating
animation for the web is a relatively new activity for me (the past 2 or 3 years),
creating animated sequences is not. I started out my career working as a film
animator when I worked for a technical film crew some twenty years ago. In those
days we painted on acetate cells. Months of hard work was rewarded with a few
seconds of excruciating pleasure as I screened the final sequence after it was
shot on film. Later I was an animation consultant, still for technical films,
but this time I supplied the base artwork and a computer operator created the
animation. It still took forever, but we thought it was fast. I didn't really
like the hands off approach even though the occasional catered lunches in the
studio were a treat.
More recently I have been able to do it all myself right up to the moment of sending the files out to be recorded on film, or dumped to Betacam video for broadcast. I wouldn't have it any other way. Often I will do in one afternoon on my Mac what would have taken me weeks to do at the start of my career. It allows me to get the maximum enjoyment out of the part of animation that I like best: Ushering the eyeballs of an audience around the screen to convey a message. It is a shame I wasted all that time painting on cells... but then, perhaps it wasn't all wasted, after all I did learn how to daydream.
© 2001 Simon Tuckett
www.simontuckett.com
Last update: August 12, 2001.