Tuesday February 19, 2002

Asciimation Links

• Star Wars : The only asciimation that has so far gone mainstream. Linked to from hundreds of pages usually with the description "Created by a Kiwi with waaay too much time on his hands".
• Caribouteries : A French language website, but don't let that put you off. Using whatever you learnt from school (Le singe est dans l'arbre) head straight towards Les MangaRibous which are the animated ones. I found the site layout a little confusing, but each ascii thumbnail has 2 links, the top one views the animation (Java applet), while the bottom link allows you to download all of it as a text file. Some of these are incredibly well done: the adventures of Supercaribou (also in English) was cinematographic in its execution. Most impressive, definitely deserves more linkage!
• Around midnight - Ascii theatre : Some fairly short, but rather nicely executed, gory little animations. The whole site is very simple, consistent and well designed.
• b'ger's ascii art gallery : b'ger is an excellent ascii artist with his own style, somewhere between fine-art and cartoon. Only a few short animations, but I think they are exceptionally beautiful.
• gnv: 'simple and not so simple animations' : Spanish language website. Very nicely done short animations. Also like the original artwork ("Mi propio ascii art").
• Dan Hunt's gargoyle : Possibly the first ascii animation I ever saw.
• mbp99's Asciimations : Nice, short, narrative animations.
• Clint's ascii animation gallery. : A slow, banner infested tripod site. But though the sub-pr0n 'perverted' animations are childish in the extreme, these are 'narrative', and there's a lot of humour and enthusiasm.

Episode 3 - the countdown

1. The new frame scrollbar in the Jave 4.0 alpha that I'm roadtesting. As the name implies, it meant that I could move from frame 1 to frame 130 without having to click past every frame in turn. Very handy.
2. A better understanding of the .jmov file format. The format is very simple, and though (currently) the frame manipulation options within the editor are still fairly basic, and there is no way of moving multiple frames between movies, it's fairly easy to open up your text-editor of choice and cut and paste frames that way. So I copied the whole standard intro to the beginning of the work in progress in a matter of seconds.

   _ | | | | |_| _ Ahaaa! |_| MM oo ` < o/ /^\ : C : 8===8 |^| .||| ~-~-

3. A brainwave. To do the transition from 'black' (a screen full of a dark character, usually '8') to the opening frame, I used a simple procedure.

   Then

   1. Start with the opening frame
   2. duplicate the current frame
   3. add some black to it
   4. repeat steps 2 and 3 until all black.
   5. Now all the frames are in the wrong order, so manually click "Move Left" and "Move Right" to sort the frames into the right order.
   This, as I realise now, was stupid. I should have.

   Now

   1. Start with the opening frame
   2. duplicate the current frame
   3. Move to the Previous frame
   4. add some black to it
   5. repeat steps 2,3,4 until all black
   Obviously as and when JavE includes the functionality to reverse sequences of frames, it may well be quicker to use the first technique.

I still need to create the static comic strip version, but I think this will be an even quicker job using the techniques described in a previous article.