"Assault and Battery", a CyberPaint animation by John C. Blakely All artwork, and general animation work is Copyright 1988 by John C. Blakely. Permission to distribute is granted, provided this text file accompanies all copies of the animation.If used where this text file cannot be displayed or provided, please provide credit to the author/artist. "Bob the Blob" was more or less a simplistic idea of telling a story with CyberPaint. My latest attempt is "Assault and Battery", which is a much longer, and more involved animation work. This one took quite a while to develop, trying to find the right 'gags' for the story, and figuring out how to implement them with CyberPaint. As with "Raisins", and "Bob the Blob", I used DEGAS ELITE to draw the main character cells. Although I didn't use that program quite as much this time. About 75% of what you see was done with CyberPaint alone. I'll probalby get used to using it 100% in the future, but right now, DEGAS ELITE has a better feel to it when it comes to drawing for me. To make the title and ending screens, I used STREAK with the 5 pixel (round) brush, and just wrote like I would with a pencil. It took a few tries, but I finaly made what I thought were nice titles. I faded them out using the technique described in my "Bob the Blob" text file. The various positions of the Battery's mouth were just pasted on different cells. The battery's features were done entirely with CyberPaint. Where objects tilt, or rotate, the ADO/FX menu was used with either blocks (Battery and battery top) or with seperate .SEQ files (Dynamite). When using these options, be prepared to do some touch-up work, as rotating objects tends to distort them quite a bit (I've found that angles of 45 degrees make GREAT rotations, it's the points in between that end up looking jaggedy). You may not even need to do much touch up; if your animation is running fast enough the distortions won't be noticed too much. The explosion portion of the program was a "Cyberclip" (my name) section I had made about 3 months ago. I keep a few of these clips sitting on disks here and there, I have explosions, star fields, fires, and other little doo-dads all made up for instant use when I may need something like that. The explosion REALLY came in handy, and saved me a half hour or more work. At the end of the animation, you may notice the fade-out of the characters. I chose this type of fade-out, because it took up only about 30K or so. My original idea was to use either a dot- by-dot disolve, or a linear-type disolve (where blank lines criss- scoss the screen until there's no picture left), but soon found this was going to take well over 50K to do! I made this fade-out using successive "defocus" operations, and it turned out pretty well! I should also mention how I sychronized the mouth movements to the text bubbles of the characters (Try it, read the texts once, then, remembering what each character is saying, just say the words aloud to the characters' mouth movements...they synch!). Do what I did, figure out how many syllables are in each word, and where each new syllable is, open the mouth. Most every time, a word begins a new syllable with a vowel, of which, there are six (I count 'y'). What you'll need to do is study your mouth for each type of vowel sound, and draw what it looks like. Also, you'll need to know how sounds like "N" and "M" will look. A lot of sounds can use the same mouth positions, so it isn't as hard as it sounds. "T" and "N" can use the same mouth positions. One book that will help you GREALY (as it has me), is TIMING FOR ANIMATION by HAROLD WHITAKER and JOHN HALAS, Focal Press Limited, London/Focal Press Inc., New York - 1981. This has LOADS of great ideas on timing of explosion effects, "Thuds", mouth to word synchronization, story-boarding techniques, and oodles of examples. If you have about $35 to invest in a good animation book, check this one out! Well, I hope you enjoy this little cartoon...I'll keep 'em coming as long as I have the incentive (and with my weird sence of humor, that should be quite a while yet). I'd appreciate any feedback you might want to give me, and I'll give you some ways to reach me, below. Also, if you'd like to use this in any kind of presentation, let me know (it is a copyrighted work), and I'll be glad to let'cha! About the only thing I'd like is some recognition for my work! You can reach me at: My own Atari ST/XE bulletin board, running 24 hours a day, on custom software. On-line games, and more to enjoy, even if you don't have a comment, drop in and have some fun! ATASCII and VT- 52 support! The O-Mayer V BBS (213) 732-0229 300/1200 baud! Or, if you have GEnie, my mail-address is: "J.BLAKELY", drop me a line! ENJOY! -John C. Blakely Copyright 1988 JcB Animations.