My Big Fat Geek Movie

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 13, 2004

 

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 Hollywood moguls wasn’t easy, though. I thought I’d be able to land a screenplay gig pretty easily – I sent off a couple of my cuter columns (many of them are just begging to be turned into movie, don’t you think?) to the major Hollywood studios. Nothing. Then I tried the minor Hollywood studios. Still nothing. I even tried Bollywood – still nothing!

 

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 Hollywood, “the goods,” and unlike the studio insiders, I am going to let all my friends in on the secret. If you want to produce your own animated movies quickly and easily (everybody knows that the big money is in cartoons!), do like I did and download Dollysoft Tales Animator!

 

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