RailRide's Crossing > Department of Anthromedia > Animations
Animations
Way back in high school, possibly before I created the characters you see in this section. I did some animation. Not that I knew what I was doing, but there were a couple of things true of me back then: (1) I was really into shifting camera effects in hand-drawn animation and (2) I watched TransFormers every day (among other animated shows of the time).
Partly to see if I could do it, and partly because I was able to make it into my primary classwork for the semester (I got a 90+ grade for the class) I did a humongous flipbook animation that spoofed the opening sequence of the TransFormers' first season. Some 493 frames later (as reported by Win32 properties--the files as created were originally digitized under Win 3.1) it was complete. It wasn't a scene-for-scene parody, since I was preoccupied with showing off by animating a multitude of swooping, rotating "camera effects", But considering the artistic abilities of my peers at the time, it was really good. Anyone who thought about it realized the motions I was making weren't easy at all to draw out (in fact, if the same movements are called for today, they're done by computer)
By then the second season was well underway, and I undertook an effort to lampoon that as well. This animation wound up having roughly half the frames (264) of it's predecessor, since it was a scene-for-scene parody. But there were a few occasions for more camera angle movements, although nothing as involved as the first one. The characters I invented for these two animations aren't anthropomorphic (at least by my standards), but until I create more, there really isn't enough material to justify creating their own section in the main Table of Content. So, I stuck them here in the Department of Anthromedia until further notice. If I produce any animation with my regular anthro characters, they will go here.
Technical:
The two flipbooks were digitized using a black-and-white Connectix QuickCam hooked to a 486 laptop (the same one mentioned in "Partners in Crime" and "It's Alive" in the main Pure Text section). The initial uncompressed files were 36 and 19 megabytes respectivley, and as you might imagine , files of this size are a bit much for a 486 to munch on in a timely manner. But it was the fastest machine I had at the time, and it eventually finished with the two files a few hours later. The Cinepak codec may be a bit old, but it'll play on all versions of Windows back to Win 3.1.
However, the Connectix software locked the color depth at 24 bits (even though it's black & white), and the framerate at 5 per second, so the files are still larger than they probably could be, and play slower than they should (yes, even the 486 could've played them faster had the software not coded it the way it did) If you have the means to fix the framerate and file size, please fill me in so I can make these downloads less onerous for those of us with dial-up.
| TrashFormers 1 (1:38) | TrashFormers 2 (0:58) |
| 9,623,632 bytes, Cinepak codec | 5,607,636 bytes, Cinepak codec |