Workshops
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Workshops
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»You often hear that NASA still uses Amigas, that in some movies the special effects are made with Amigas, etc. But you seldom hear about the rather unknown, nonetheless very talented people still using Amigas. And Eric W. Schwartz is one of them, there is no doubt.
In the late eighties, Eric read in a magazine about the Amiga and its fantastic graphic capabilities, in which he was interested, and so 1988 he bought his first Amiga 500.
At this time, he already had an C64 and was, of course, impressed by the possibilities the Amiga offered. He was especially fascinated by the graphic and sound features.
After Eric dicovered the program "Moviesetter" by GoldDisk, he created his first cartoon movies like "Stealthy Maneuver" and "How to run into a wall". He made these on the aforementioned Amiga 500 with one megabyte memory and a second floppy drive.
Later, when Eric was on the College, he got an Amiga 2000 and equipped it with 3 MB RAM. On this computer, he created the (more commonly known) works like "The Anti Lemming Demo" and the first "Flip the Frog" clip. He was very proud of the latter, because it was (despite the limit of 3MB) almost four minutes long.
And while we are at frogs: the comic intro in the game "SuperFrog" was made by no one else that Eric.
But also some drawings by Eric, commenting the development of the Amiga, should be well known, for example the legendary "The Survivor".
But the best known characters created by Eric should be Amy and Sabrina, whose life-story is regulary continued in comic strips on the Internet, and of course, the Amiga can't be left out there. It started at a Computer fair, where Sabrina is looking for an Internet provider; went on with several relationship problems of Amy, on to Sabrinas little sister and pain-in-the-neck Tabitha - well drawn, funny, worth watching!
Erics current system is an Amiga 4000T with a Cyberstorm PPC, Cybervision 64, VLab Motion, Multiport-card, and even more. Exemplary, it runs OS 3.5. For his drawings, he mostly uses Personal Paint and Photogenics.
And what does Eric think about the new Amiga owners Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss and does he think that finally something good will happen? I will just let him answer himself:
"It's difficult to say for certain. I admit, I was more excited when Jim Collas and Gateway were running things, and the new Amiga OS would have had a Linux core. I felt that would have been the best hope to bring the Amiga platform out of obscurity and make it a strong alternative choice to Windows or Macintosh. I'm not as confident with Bill McEwen's and Fleecy Moss's new Amiga plans, but I am willing to see what they come up with. It's definitely better than what little Gateway had planned after Jim Collas left."
By the way, many works of Eric can be found in Aminet at...
Erics own site you will find here...
And the mentioned comic strips can be seen at...
Oliver Tacke <O.Tacke@surfway.de>«
