ATF Agility by Eric Schwartz

This Aerotoon animation requires one megabyte of memory to run. It was
created with the following programs.

Disney Animation Studio -     Animation, color, and preliminary production
DeluxePaint III  -            Touch-up and Anim-standardizing
Animation Station -           final timing, color, and sound synching

The History of ATF Agility:

  While attending my freshman year at the Columbus College of Art and
Design, I came up with the idea for this animation, My father had recently
purchased the Disney Animation studio, and, due to the nature of my
animation idea, I chose the fast pageflipping Disney studio other than my
usual workhorse, Moviesetter, which,from the nature of its animation
system and Hardware/software limitations, can only do about 8-10 frames
per second. ATF Agility was fully animated, with many more drawings per
second than one of my Moviesetter works, which blits still and animated
brushes around the screen. Disney worked wonderfully. Its onion skin
feature greatly speeded up production. Disney also promises frame-synched
sound, and timing and pallete changes in mid-animation, just like
Moviesetter. All those features work beautifully, if you're willing to
learn the language of the slightly-esoteric exposure sheet module, But
these features are only available when you use Disney's proprietary CFAST
animation file format. No biggie, I thought, I'm used to that
(Moviesetter's proprietary too), and I would get a lot of benefits that a
garden variety ANIM cant do. I colored the Animation in Disney's
Ink'n'Paint module, which could use a LOT more capability, so I could keep
with the beautiful, clever CFAST format, Right?     HAH!!   
  The final CFAST file saved out at 880K for a 22 second, 15 fps, 8-color
animation - Just slightly bigger than a disk. because I had no Hard drive,
I compressed the file and wrote a script to decompress upon running.
Hardly a good solution; the overhead caused it to require 2.5 megs to run
properly from a floppy, or 1.5 and an ASSIGN command to run from a hard
drive. This was November of 1990. The situation didn't change for a while.
  June 1991. I purchased Progressive Peripherals' Animation Station, Which
promised some of the abilites of the Disney program using standard ANIMs
I resaved the CFAST file as an ANIM-5. 432k - Quite an improvement over
880k, Cfast files are just plain huge. Animation Station and its
Animplayer allow Pallete changes during an animation, Timing changes for
holds on frames without adding duplicate frames, and digitised sound
synching via a script file that works exactly like a Sculpt/Movie sound
script. It has its share of limitations and problems, (My Animation
Station seems to know the GURU personally) but it works, The New ATF
Agility runs nearly identically to the original version. Takes up only a
bit more than half a disk including player program. only requires 1-meg,
and can run from any directory. You can even load it into Dpaint and check
it out, but youll probably lose the fringe benefits.

Eric Schwartz

E.S. Productions
P.O. Box 292684
Kettering, OH 45429-0684