“Seven years ago it was the sight of a ray-traced juggler on the A1000 which helped bring attention to Commodore’s new wonder machine,” CU Amiga reminded its readers in November 1992. “Amiga animation has come a long way since then.” Its round-up of the best public-domain animations shows how far. An American student, Eric Schwartz, was drawing cartoons good enough to be sold on video. In Germany, Tobias Richter had made ray-traced Star Trek battles and been commissioned by Team17 for an Alien Breed animation. Others had digitised film clips, made a squirrel fight a Star Wars walker, and answered each other’s work with parodies. All of it travelled on floppy disks, ordered by catalogue number from public-domain libraries, and none of it needed more than an Amiga, the right software and a lot of patience.
Fast facts
- Began: with The Juggler, Eric Graham’s ray-traced robot of late 1986.
- Tools: Deluxe Paint (animation from version III in 1989), MovieSetter, Disney Animation Studio, Sculpt 3D and Sculpt-Animate 4D, Imagine, and LightWave 3D.
- File format: IFF ANIM, which stores a first frame and then only the changes from frame to frame.
- Distribution: public-domain libraries such as Fred Fish’s disks, 17-Bit, NBS and PD Soft; bulletin boards; from 1992, Aminet.
- Well-known animators: Eric Schwartz, Tobias Richter.
- The professional side: genlocks, time-base correctors and NewTek’s Video Toaster.
The Juggler and the public-domain disk
Eric Graham’s Juggler was a loop of 24 ray-traced frames shown in the Amiga’s 4,096-colour hold-and-modify mode, and it spread the way Amiga animation would go on spreading: on public-domain disks. By February 1987 Amazing Computing was listing it on a user-group disk as “a by-now famous demo of HAM animation”, and it appeared on Fred Fish’s numbered disks, the Amiga’s largest collection of free software. When the British public-domain library Vally PD advertised in Amiga Format in January 1991, its disk 001, under “Demos & Animations”, was still The Juggler.
Animations were heavy cargo for 880K floppy disks and half-megabyte machines, which shaped what people made. Schwartz worked on an Amiga 2000 with 3MB of memory and a hard drive, but cut his demos down to run in 1MB, because most viewers did not have more. CU Amiga’s 1992 list marked the large ones: a digitised Muttley cartoon needed 3MB and came on three disks; Odyssey filled five; Jim Robinson’s ray-traced A Small Station at Khern, a spacecraft landing on a Martian base, had been reworked to run in 1MB. Each entry gave the library and disk code a reader needed to order it, such as 17-Bit 1574 for Odyssey.
Cartoons and parodies
The best-loved work was hand-drawn. Schwartz drew in Deluxe Paint, roughed out movement in Disney Animation Studio and put the pictures and sound together in MovieSetter. CU Amiga called him “the man of the moment” and put his success down to character and scripts: his animations “feature strong characters and are well scripted, which sets them apart from many currently available animations”. Steve Packer’s cartoon hero Chuck had a disk of his own, in which Chuck rode a motorbike through the backstreets in a send-up of Akira.
The animators borrowed from each other. Schwartz reworked The Juggler, adding a female juggler who sidles up to the robot, winks and breaks his concentration. He answered the Walker demo, in which an AT-AT digitised from The Empire Strikes Back strolled past, with Amy vs the Walker, starring his own Amy the Squirrel. His Lemmings cartoon, in which a jet fighter blew the lemmings up, was taken a step further in another animator’s Lemmings Revenge: this time one lemming survives, climbs into a biplane and goes after the jet.
Competitions gave the community a stage. In 1991 the Amiga Centre Scotland’s animation competition, held during the Edinburgh Festival, drew nearly 50 entries. Paul Franklin’s Mondo Data Phage won the non-commercial category and a Harlequin 24-bit graphics card, Ken Blackey’s The Fly won the commercial category, and Schwartz’s The Dating Game also took a prize.
How the files worked
Most of this work was saved in IFF ANIM, the animation member of the Amiga’s family of interchange file formats, described in the advertising of the time as the “Aegis/Sparta ANIM format” and specified by Gary Bonham. An ANIM file holds a complete first picture and then, for each later frame, only the differences. Commodore’s ROM Kernel Reference Manual lists several ways of encoding those differences, among them “Byte Vertical Delta” mode, the one Deluxe Paint III used for its animated brushes, and a mode credited to Eric Graham. Storing changes instead of whole frames was what made an animation of any length fit on a floppy disk and play back fast enough.
The professional half
The same machines did paid work. In 1992 AmigaWorld published a whole special issue on desktop video and animation, and its cover counted the market: “24-Bit Displays, 11 Amiga Genlocks, 6 Video Titlers, 8 3-D Packages, 4 Edit Controllers”. A genlock let an Amiga’s picture be laid over a video signal. The inside cover advertised the DPS Personal TBC II, a time-base corrector card that kept video sources in step, which “plugs into your Commodore Amiga or PC system for only $995”, “thousands less than conventional TBC hardware”.
The issue read like a television course. It explained A/B roll editing, why “if you want to edit videotape accurately, you need to know the basics of ‘time code’”, how to get video signals in sync and how to record animation to tape a frame at a time. Next to that it taught the traditional craft: storyboards, sound synchronisation and walk cycles (“how to walk before you run”), with one writer arguing that “sometimes tried-and-true traditional animation techniques are exactly what you need”.
At the top end was NewTek’s Video Toaster, a card for the Amiga 2000 that shipped in 1990 with LightWave 3D. Toaster-equipped Amigas made the space scenes of Babylon 5 and the submarine of seaQuest DSV. The hobbyist trading cartoons by post and the studio rendering television effects used the same computers, read the same magazines and, often, the same programs.
Sources
- “PD Animation: Leaders of the pack”, CU Amiga Amiga Guide supplement, November 1992, pp. 26–28: the Juggler’s influence; Eric Schwartz, Tobias Richter and their work; Muttley, Odyssey, A Small Station at Khern, Steve Packer’s Chuck, the Walker demo and its parody, Schwartz’s Juggler, Lemmings Revenge; library disk codes; Schwartz’s equipment, tools and 1MB versions.
- Amazing Computing vol. 2 no. 2, February 1987, p. 93: the Juggler on an AMICUS public domain disk.
- Amiga Format issue 18, January 1991, p. 185: Vally PD advertisement (disk 001, The Juggler).
- The Public domain entry and its sources: The Juggler on Fred Fish’s disks.
- Amiga Computing issue 42, November 1991, p. 14: the Amiga Centre Scotland Animation Competition (nearly 50 entries; Paul Franklin, Ken Blackey, Eric Schwartz).
- AC’s Guide to the Commodore Amiga, spring/summer 1990, p. 30, and fall 1990, p. 14: products supporting the “Aegis/Sparta ANIM format”.
- Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual: Devices, 3rd edition (Commodore-Amiga, Addison-Wesley, 1991), IFF appendix, “ANIM brush format”: an ANIM as a first ILBM followed by delta frames; Gary Bonham’s ANIM specification; the compression modes, including Byte Vertical Delta and “Eric Graham’s compression mode”.
- AmigaWorld Special Issue, Desktop Video and Animation, 1992 (IDG): cover; inside-cover DPS Personal TBC II advertisement; contents (time code, video sync, walk cycles, traditional techniques).
- The Eric Schwartz, The Juggler, Deluxe Paint, Public domain and Video Toaster entries and their sources.