Simplified Animations for Windows Paint and Photo Editor with Sound using Freeware Programs

These first four animations were produced with a special gif animating programme. It is a freeware program from jansfreeware.com : http://jansfreeware.com/movies12.zip.

The rest of this page deals with other methods of animation and to work through it, the following programs or similar ones are needed in addition to Windows. The ones I list are all free as of early 2002:

Please search for the names along with the terms 'freeware' and 'download'.

To produce a simple moving character, a background image can be duplicated many times with the character placed in different positions on each one. Each duplicated background image is given a separate number and a program combines them to produce a .avi. Sound can be added and using noise reduction and an audio and video editor means the cheapest of microphones and sound cards can produce an acceptable audio track.

You might consider using just a simple circular character produced in Microsoft Paint to try the processes out. Any picture file can be used as a background image.

pjBmp2Avi uses .bmp input and JPGVideo uses .jpg input. If a .jpg or other type of file is saved as a .bmp before duplicating, it may change colors in the final result so it's best to do a test on a small section. Sometimes the changes look good. See if it works through acceptably to the end product.

JPGVideo outputs motion in either direction. Also, reflection of all the frames of a sequence produces the same sequence of actions in the opposite direction, of course. Microsoft Photo Editor does this sort of transformation.

To animate, put the background frame in a folder and copy it over and over to the same folder. Left clicking and taking the cursor over many copies at once makes that easy. Rename the files in sequence.

FrameCaddie is a programme for generating frame titles, although only with the file ending .pic. Still, you can copy the first part of each title which Frame Caddie outputs and paste it in to give the frame title.

Any character you want to animate can be pasted into the different frames. You can drag and drop the numbered background images one by one into the window of Paint and place a character where required. Another method is to undo after each save and so to retain one background image which is saved with a different number each time after the character has been inserted. Images for characters can be stored in a table on an html document and pasted in. Tracks can be marked on the screen in advance. Choose the transparent background option for anything pasted in from Microsoft Paint.

MSDOS can be used to change numbers of frames. Keep names short for this. First move the folder to your C: folder. Then if, for example, it is called Pics and the files are called pic00.jpg, pic01.jpg etc., they can be renamed by typing something like this into the MSDOS window, depending on what change you would like to make:

ren C:\Pics\pic01.jpg pic0100.jpg

That only renames one, but using the right arrow you can quickly do the next line, adjusting only the numbers. Using wild cards (*) in the code might be useful sometimes. Otherwise numbers can be changed by using the List command in the folder holding the images. (Please note that to try and reverse the action using Bmp2Avi by changing the first frame's number directly to that of the last, etcetera, would delete half the images.)

For complicated scenes, the order of each character in the composition, that is how far forward or back it appears in a stack, depends on the order in which items are pasted in. Using shortcut keys speeds things up and to begin, try 'Alt' +'F' followed by 'S' to save changes quickly.

A noise reduction programme, LAPS, can be used in its free version for sound files up to 1 minute in length. With that you can use Microsoft's Sound Recorder, which is part of the standard Windows package, and a basic microphone to produce an acceptable sound track with a standard quality sound card. The output from LAPS can be .mp3 or .wav.

When you have some .avis and .wavs ready for joining you can combine them using DDClip which is an audio and video editor. So sound files up to one minute in length should be acceptable. You export the finished .avi from DDClip and can then compress with the Avi2mpg programme if required.

The last program on the list, VirtualDub, is for producing backgrounds from existing video footage and many other things. Characters can be added to the .bmps from VirtualDub ready for conversion back to .avi.

Copyright©2002Andrew Burbidge

andrew_burbidge@hotmail.com

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