A Day at the Beach - A Flip the Frog Cartoon by Eric Schwartz ©1992

Minimum Setup: Any Amiga Computer with at least 3 megs of RAM

Recommended Setup: 3.5 megs of RAM or more, and two Floppy drives or a
Hard Drive.

* Owners of AGA and Workbench 3.0 Amigas may wish to reboot their machines
in the 'Original' chipset emulation mode before running this animation
for best results. Some AGA users may have difficulty running this
animation (the player returns an 'out of memory' error, even when there
is plenty) or the animation plays badly centered with the edges cropped
(usually with a multisync monitor.) Users experiencing these problems
should, if possible, close other programs that are on their own screens,
Reconfigure their Workbench screen to NTSC or PAL mode with 16 colors or
less, and remove any pictures used as workbench and window backdrops.
These measures should fix most of the problems associated with playing
Moviesetter animations.

* LICENSE: This Animation is Copyright (c) 1992 Eric W. Schwartz. it is
NOT to be considered Public Domain. This animation is Freely
Distributable as long as the files are unaltered and kept together with
this README text file. Permission from the Author must be obtained before
these files can be converted to other formats, including but not limited
to Video, Print, Or computer formats other than Amiga. Finally, characters
created for these animations, are the sole property of Eric W. Schwartz,
and should not be used in pictures and animations by others.

This animation requires at least 3 megs of memory to play correctly. Two
floppy drives are not required but are recommended because the disk
swapping would kill most normal people. Users of hard drives and/or 
Kickstart 2.0 with only 3 megs may have trouble because of the memory taken
up by the system. In this case, you may have to run the animation from a 
CLI without loading workbench. The CLI command is:

     CD FlipDisk1:
     Movieplayer A_Day_at_the_Beach

There are two disks in the Low-density Floppy version. These two disks
MUST be named Flipdisk1: and Flipdisk2: for the animation to load
correctly. There is another disk which contains an archived version of the
animation to be unpacked onto a Hard Drive or any other device with 1.5
megs of free disk space. I feel this method is much easier than you having
to construct your own HardDrive version from the floppy version. 

This animation sets a new record for SIZE in my animations. It plays for
approximately four minutes thirty seconds with little repetition.
(Note: this statement was written in early 1992)

A HISTORY OF FLIP THE FROG:

	Flip was created around 1931 by animator Ub Iwerks. Iwerks was
originally a friend and partner with Walt Disney in their fledgeling
cartoon studio. Ub designed the original Mickey Mouse and animated the
first few Mickey short cartoons almost single-handed. Iwerks was the
skilled draftsman and animator, while Disney wrote and directed. Around
1930/31, A producer named Pat Powers offered Iwerks the chance to have his
own studio and he Accepted. The cartoons Iwerks created Powers would
distribute to MGM. Iwerks' first character was Flip the Frog, and flip's
debut was in a VERY early 1931 two strip color(three strips are needed for
a full spectrum) cartoon called Fiddlesticks. in this cartoon Flip
resembled a real frog. after a couple cartoons, the producer urged Iwerks
to redesign Flip into something "cuter". In the process Flip gained a hat,
gloves, shoes and shorts, making him look a lot less like a frog and more
like Mickey Mouse with the ears and black nose ripped off. Flip the Frog
cartoons, and Iwerks' cartoons in genenal, did not have much success
because Iwerks lacked the inventiveness and storytelling ability to match
his abilities as artist and animator. (The reverse could be said about
Walt Disney, which is why the two made a very good team) In 1933, Flip the
Frog was abandoned for the character Willie Whopper. several years after
that, the Powers/Iwerks studio shut down completely. Iwerks went back to
Disney, and became a sort of mechanical engineer, pioneering the process
of xeroxing pencil drawings onto clear cels (to make the animation process
quicker and cheaper). Flip the Frog and the Iwerks studio were almost
completely forgotten, except to animation historians. --- -- Until..
In the year 1990, Eric Schwartz attended a presentation of old cartoon
shorts at the Columbus College of Art and Design, wher he attends classes.
One of the Cartoons shown was a Flip the Frog cartoon, "Room Runners",
which impressed Schwartz with its good animation and surprising amount of
sexual jokes for a 1930's cartoon. Eric Began to storyboard his own Flip
the Frog Cartoon. He originally intended to copy 'Room Runners' but
switched to his own storyline. Flip was redesigned, stylised, and
modernized (he also looks something like a frog). Using the Amiga computer
as his medium, Schwartz brought Flip the Frog back to the world. Flip has
appeared in two modern cartoons so far; 'The Dating Game'in 1991 and 
'A Day at the Beach'in 1992. More cartoons are planned, for an as yet
undetermined date.

As Always,

Eric Schwartz

E.S. Productions
P.O. Box 292684
Kettering. OH 45429-0684
U.S.A.

P.S. This is ESTSA (Eric Schwartz's Third Shareware Animation). As is my
policy with these, If you feel its worth it, send whatever you feel like
to help me pay for college. If not, don't.
(P.P.S. - I graduated from College in July, 1994)