My Big
Fat Geek Movie
By David Shamah,
The
John Grisham? Ha! Michael
Crichton? Feh! Tom Wolfe? Fuhgeddaboudit!
If any writer is going to
grab an Oscar this year, it’s going to be me!
That’s right, this year’s
it’s the “outsider’s” turn to come away with the top prize, and this time the
outsider is going to yours truly. It’s time the little guy got in on this
book-to-movie gravy train, and, as you know, they don’t come littler than me.
Those super-authors have been hogging the screenplay action until now, and I
can write for the screen just as well as they can. I think the time is ripe:
How many more of those Grisham courtroom dramas do they expect us to sit
through?
Getting the attention of
Obviously this wasn’t
working too well. Apparently, I was missing something – perhaps a special
writing technique or style that movie moguls look for when reviewing scripts.
Cute just isn’t enough nowadays – you’ve got to write with the movies in mind,
and make sure that your material can easily be translated into dialogue,
screenplay and stage directions. You’d think they’d be able to find someone on
their large staffs for that kind of work (have you ever sat through the full
credit list at the end of a movie nowadays?), but, no; if they don’t “get it”
right away, they’re just not interested.
And then I found it – the
secret software application that Grisham and co. have obviously been using to
compose their screenplays! After a few sessions with this download, I was able
to produce dialog and screen direction that literally made the characters jump
off the page and onto the screen!
This is definitely, as they
say in
Even if you don’t want to
get into serious movie producing and don’t get all those technical terms, like
“gaffer” and “best boy,” you can still easily author entertaining animations
for home, school, or any other purpose. Tales Animator has enough tools to
allow an adult to put together a cute animated presentation for their kids; at
the same time, its interface is easy enough for kids to handle, and they will
be able to produce their own animations quickly.
Tales Animator’s tools
consist of an editable list of actors, backgrounds and commands. You select an
actor, a background, and write up a command list, press the Render button, and Tales Animator will take your data and put
together a presentation, suitable for playing in Windows Media Player. The
standard actors are animations of men, women, animals, inanimate objects like
balls, spaceships, etc. You can easily edit any actor, though, in your
preferred drawing program, or in MS Paint. You can save the edited actor under
a new name in the actors folder, and you can also
download actors from the Dollysoft Web site, so you
really are unlimited in terms of potential players for your movie. Once you’ve
chosen your actors, you need to select a background. The program comes with
about 20 pre-made backgrounds, but again, you can create your own; any jpeg or
bitmap image will do, as long as they are saved in the backgrounds folder.
There’s also a foregrounds command, which works the same way.
Now comes the fun part.
Unlike other programs of this type, Tales Animator gets its stage direction
from text commands. The program has a built-in scripting language that you
invoke in order to create action. You call the background, the actors, and then
describe the actions the actors take in order to produce a scene and/or a
movie.
Let’s say you wanted to
produce a little story with a scene where two children are lost in the forest,
looking for their grandpas. First you would insert a background, by using a
command like “background forest,” which will appear throughout the entire scene
(you can have more than one background/scene in a movie). Now you can insert
your actors by “declaring” them using Tales Animator’s scripting language; you
select an actor type from the list, like Grandpa, and attach a name to it – so,
you can have an actor called Grandpa Joe, and another one called Grandpa Herb.
The two don’t have to have exactly the same icon, though; besides editing the
character in a paint program, you can use Tales Animator’s scripting language
to change the icon’s appearance – in this case, you would use the “scale” command
and a percentage (like 0.6) to make one of characters bigger or smaller. You
position the character’s location on the screen by scripting, too; use the
command “appears at” in conjunction with pixel position (like “character appears at (700,200”), and then use the command
“goes to” to move them around.
Once your characters are on
the screen, you can use the scripting commands to get them to do stuff. The
commands consist of actions like: moves to (as in “character name moves to”),
goes to, turns around, points to right, etc. (the full list can be found in the
help file). There is also a command called “says” – which lets your character
speak. Tales Animator contains a small internal text-to-speech engine, which
you can use if you download the lite or standard
versions of the program. The program can also use Microsoft's Speech API
system, which provides better sound support, and is included in the
professional version of the program, which is a 18MB download (the program has
the same features in all three versions, except for the included speech API and
fewer pictures in the smaller versions; all the versions are free).
It doesn’t have many bells
and whistles, but Tales Animator is easy to learn and control and really is
very versatile. The program comes with some very good examples of scripts,
which you can emulate or even cut and paste into your own productions – it
looks like all the commands are used at least once in the various samples. And
all sorts of elements can be included in the scripts; your own bitmaps and
jpegs, and even Word or Excel files (there’s an example of this in at least one
of the sample scripts). The Web site says that the program can use any object
supported by OLE linking – so you don’t have to make a separate file or
screenshot to include an item in your movie. The movies are saved in AVI format
(the codecs are built into Windows, but Tales
Animator also supports other codecs, like DivX). Convenient, and pretty
advanced for a simple program, if you ask me. Tales Animator is a great way to
produce a little birthday present video for the kids, build an e-mail
presentation for relatives, or let kids get creative with their own cartoons.
Or, to produce an Oscar winner! And don’t worry – my acceptance speech will
include all those I have to thank for this award: Grandpa Joe, Grandpa Herb,
and, of course, Dollysoft!
Download Tales Animator from
http://www.dollysoft.com. For all Windows systems.
Questions and comments to ds@newzgeek.com or http://www.newzgeek.com