(Please be patient, Zoetrope applet is 74K in size)

About ZOETROPE

• I wrote Zoetrope as a toy for my kids, to be able to animate small cartoons using a simple panel editor.
• The toolbar buttons down the left of the input panels are:
  • free drawing
  • straight line drawing
  • erase
  • fill/splash
  • oval drawing
  • rectangle drawing
  • filled oval drawing
  • filled rectangle drawing
• To change the drawing color (shown in the square to the left of the color palette), click on the desired color.
• You can right-click in any of the input panels for a simple popup menu of common editing commands:
  • Undo
  • Copy to next cell
  • Copy to previous cell
  • Fade (darker or lighter)
  • Clear cell
• Select one of the four animations I have provided (Bird, Bounce, Heart, and Switch), or choose blank and create your own. Start and stop the animation using the GO/Stop button. The slider can be used to vary the speed of the animator.
• Here are some ideas of animations you could create of your own:
  • a campfire
  • a rocket taking off
  • a ball rolling down a hill
  • a snowman melting
• One animation trick is to start by drawing the unchanging part of the picture. For instance, if you were going to animate a campfire, just draw the logs in the first cell, then use the "Copy to next" command to copy those logs to all the other cells. Then go back and animate the flames in each cell. (If you like, start with the Logs file, and add your own flames. Because you drew the flames separately for each cell, when you animate them, they will appear to move.) This technique was also done in Bounce and Bird. Note that in Bird, I "animated" the grass as well as the bird - you'll see this effect often in many animated commercials and TV shorts.
• Switch uses a variation on the previous trick. I drew the light switch plate first, then copied it to all 8 cells. After adding the changing switch and the moving hand, I was able to use the fill tool to color each entire cell, with a dim color while the switch is off, then a brighter color when the switch is on. The result is a sort of obsessive-compulsive video, of a hand forever trying to turn on a switch that wont stay turned on!
• Zoetrope was written in Java, using the Kawa development platform and the JDK1.1.x. If you are running Internet Explorer, you may need to run Sun's Java Plug-in to fully support this version of Java.