Flicker IV: Animation |
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Having learnt how to construct a 'powerpoint' style presentation, the next Flicker feature to consider is animation. However, an animation can be thought of as a presentation in which the slides are shown one after another very quickly. Thus there is nothing new to learn! The challenge with animation is to figure out ways of producing enough slides. Flicker can churn through around fifty frames every second.
Yin and Yang is an animation of 1540 frames. It was made using !Draw. Having drawn the Yin and Yang symbol, it was rotated in 0.5 degree steps, a snapshot taken after each step. An article on drobe, still available, explained how FilmValentine was made. FilmPoloEclipse and FilmHeartThrob were made using MathMagical's ArtGraph software.
FilmCats was made by hand. It started life as an ASCII art design in !Edit. A screen snapshot grabbed one image. This was then duplicated and each subsequent frame edited in !Paint. At first only the advert on the moon seems to change, but look carefully; the stars twinkle ! Notice that there is no backdrop in this file. This is because the image is 300 by 300 pixels which fills the small projection window. As there is no room for a backdrop frame, Flicker assumes there will not be one.
There are a few other animation 'tricks' used in the examples so it is worth looking at them in !Paint to see what is going on. The start up flick, FilmIdle, only animates the left hand part of the projection window where the 'film' is moving. This was to lessen the time taken for the program load. Some animations, such as Yin and Yang, appear to pause. This is achieved by inserting a number of one pixel by one pixel frames - thus breaking an earlier rule to make all the frames the same size !
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