| The personal computer has brought us desktop publishing through programs such as Aldus Pagemaker and desktop engineering design through software like AutoCad. Will there ever be "desktop anime?" The answer is `yes,' and two animators gave Anime Central a glimpse of that future through their opening animation shown at the convention. It was a one-minute computer-generated short featuring the convention's mascots, made entirely on an ordinary PC... |  |
| ...and created by animator Samuel Crider (left), who used a standard Pentium personal computer to create the short. Bohus Blahut (right), owner of The Vantage Point, handled the post-production work. Both men once attended Columbia College and developed their art skills in school and in the real world of visual production work. |  |
| Crider created the opening animation using a piece of commercial PC software called Lightwave. He used the software's sculpting tools to create the forms of the characters and their props, such as this space station. As with cel animation where key animators hand off work to inbetweeners who make the characters move, Crider set the main positions of the characters and directed Lightwave to finish the work. he also directed the program to give the animation a flat, cel-like look instead of the fully-formed work that some animators want. |  |
| "I'm not the best draftsman in the world and I can form things better than draw them," Crider said. "That's why I go into computer animation." Lightwave makes desktop anime a real possbility, despite its steep price - more than $1,000 retail - and heavy disk space requirements (the Anime Central opening animation took up 500 MB for 50 seconds). However, Crider feels the program's potential will draw adventuresome anime fans to try it or a less-expensive version. Eventually, Lightwave animations could be as common as stapled fanzines or Web sites, Crider feels. |  |
| Blahut sees a sparkiling future for desktop animation, once people learn its possibilities - as they learned about the Net, the Web and digital publishing. "This is the period when people are discovering this is possible. Eventually you'll have a lot of this and it'll be very cool," he said. As Net bandwith increases, Blahut expects people to share Lightwave animation in the same way they trade JPEG stills and MIDI music files. |  |
Anime Central Day One |
Anime Central Day Two |
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