SPACE WARS ------------ by Bjørn A. Lynne and Tobias Richter -------------------------------------- YES, IT CAN BE DONE... WITH AMIGA! Graphics, music and animation reach new heights with German/Norwegian produced motion picture, where the Amiga is used for heavier tasks than ever before! "Space Wars" is the title of a recently produced "motion picture", which was made exclusively with Amiga animations! Thanks to a heap of good Amiga equipment, lots of experience, and even more patience, the German Tobias J. Richter and the Norwegian Bjørn A. Lynne have together produced this film, that shows what the Amiga really is capable of, if it's just used properly. Tobias Richter is a well known German animation artist who makes a living on graphics and animations - not only for games and other software, but in fact more so for German TV stations and advertisement bureaus. Bjørn A. Lynne is a freelance musician who uses the Amiga to control his stack of music equipment. Together they decided to come up with something extraordinary, to show off what they were able to do with an Amiga (or 10). Tobias used about 2 and a half months - 10 weeks - to create the 8 minute long film. The first 5 weeks were used to create and model the objects and animations; and the last 5 to actually carry out the animations. The software that was used is strictly "normal" software, that any Amiga owner can go out and buy. "Reflections" and "Videoscape" were used for the 3D animation, "DPaint" for the 2D animation of computer displays, and "Scala" was used to play it all back, and also for creating the end credits part of the movie. 5 Amigas, all equipped with 68030 processors, were used for rendering the approx. 8,000 HAM/Overscan pictures that together forms the film. Most of the pictures were made in DCTV format, but a few of them were made with a special 24-bit graphics card. In those cases, the picture itself was put in the background with "Colourmaster 24", and 2D animations were displayed on top of it; that way it was possible to record it directly to video. Animation data was stored on removable Syquest hard disks and used a total of approx. 150MB disk space. Put into perspective, this is in fact very little disk space for 8 minutes of film. And while Tobias Richter did all this in Germany, Bjørn Arild Lynne was sat in Oslo with a detailed storyboard for the movie, composing and producing the music and sound effects, especially suited for each and every scene in the movie. The music was made on a heavily upgraded A500 with MIDI interface and stereo sound sampler, using "Music-X" and "Audiomaster III". The Amiga was used to control various synthesizers and effect units; the synths used were an Ensoniq SQ-R Plus, a Korg DW8000, and a Roland Juno 2. All the music was then put together and mixed down to a DAT (Digital Audio Tape) and sent off to Germany, where the video and the DAT were edited a bit in a video workshop. Tobias says: "To create a `take', you must first create the objects you want to use. In my case, these were mostly the same spaceships as I've used in earlier animations, so I went ahead and created the special objects, like moons, asteroids and fog effects. Then you place all objects in one scene and define the movements of each object, the camera and light settings etc. Then you check the animation by watching a wireframe model. If the animation is ok, then you let the computer take over and render the real animation. This takes several hours, so it's wise to do this at night. My computer ran 6 weeks without being turned off for one second. And it's still working...." Tobias points out that all the animations were recorded directly from the Amiga, without any use of "one frame at a time" recording. So in reality, anyone at all can make a movie like this, without spending thousands of dollars in equipment. He tells us that one of the hardest parts of the whole production was getting hold of the original blueprints and data for objects used in the Star Wars and Star Trek movies. If anyone would like to take a closer look at "Space Wars", find out how to order your VHS video cassette by looking into the advertisements section of this magazine.