Does anyone here remember an old DOS program called Cartooners [1]?
It let you do animated shorts with predefined characters, different backgrounds, music, speech bubbles, etc. I used to love playing around with that as a teenager.
I found the workflow ingenious: You placed a character on the screen, selected what action you wanted it to perform (like ‘Walk’), I think you selected how you wanted it to move, then you held down the REC button and watched the character act as the animation was being ‘recorded’. To do something new, you just stopped recording, set the character up for the next action, move, etc, then do the whole REC thing again. Repeat this as needed.
Adding another character? Scrub back to where you wanted that character to appear and repeat the above process.
New background? Scrub to where you wanted the new background to appear, set the background and then ‘record’ over the old one.
It was similar for everything. Put a speech bubble down where you wanted it, hold down ‘REC’ for as long as you wanted it on the screen, then just remove it and record further as needed.
It was so damn intuitive. Never seen anything quite like it since and I’d love to know if there’s a clone of it or something out there that I’ve missed!
It let you do animated shorts with predefined characters, different backgrounds, music, speech bubbles, etc. I used to love playing around with that as a teenager.
I found the workflow ingenious: You placed a character on the screen, selected what action you wanted it to perform (like ‘Walk’), I think you selected how you wanted it to move, then you held down the REC button and watched the character act as the animation was being ‘recorded’. To do something new, you just stopped recording, set the character up for the next action, move, etc, then do the whole REC thing again. Repeat this as needed.
Adding another character? Scrub back to where you wanted that character to appear and repeat the above process.
New background? Scrub to where you wanted the new background to appear, set the background and then ‘record’ over the old one.
It was similar for everything. Put a speech bubble down where you wanted it, hold down ‘REC’ for as long as you wanted it on the screen, then just remove it and record further as needed.
It was so damn intuitive. Never seen anything quite like it since and I’d love to know if there’s a clone of it or something out there that I’ve missed!
[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Cartooners_1989