Frame Game
If drawing in Photoshop is good, drawing 500 frames of animation is great. Using a Tablet PC for traditional animation is where this class of machine really hits its stride. Arguably, there is no finer tool for 2D animation than US Animation’s ToonBoom Studio. Up until now, drawing a 30-second spot meant sitting down and drawing, roughly, 500 frames, all of which had to be scanned in, then cleaned up, then painted, then brought into an app like After Effects for stitching together into a QuickTime movie. Using a Tablet PC streamlines the entire production process by drawing directly into the application—in this case, ToonBoom Studio—where the drawings are also painted and rendered into a QuickTime movie. No erasing stray marks on paper, no scanning, and no time spent cleaning up each frame.

ToonBoom’s interface is both its strength and its weakness, and it highlights a problem with all Tablet PCs: the screen resolution is limited to 1,024 x 768. ToonBoom’s interface resembles an old-school exposure sheet and field grid, which will make any traditionally trained animator feel at home, but it’s an interface that requires more than a 1,024 x 768 screen. Ideally, a screen dedicated to drawing and one dedicated to the exposure sheet would work well. The good news is that most Tablet PC manufacturers have built in a VGA connector for driving an external monitor, and Windows XP allows this monitor to be used either as a mirror of the internal screen or as an extension of the desktop. Using it as an extended desktop presents one main issue that proved hard for me to overcome: I kept trying to use the stylus to move the cursor on the second screen.


Obviously, since I was using an ordinary 15-inch LCD panel for a second monitor, it didn’t work, but it made me realize that using this configuration means shifting between stylus and mouse whenever going from one screen to the next—something that defeats the idea of drawing directly on a screen in the first place. The whole idea is to keep things immediate, not removed from the user experience.

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Because this model, like most other Tablet PCs, has Ethernet and 802.11 WiFi built-in, integration with existing production environments should prove painless, either at your home studio, at a client’s, or at the local Internet café.

Pros and Cons
There are several important differences when drawing on a Tablet PC. For one, the screen is small. Equivalent to working on a standard sheet of paper, more space is lost because of menus and palettes. Working with the keyboard attached is essential—I hadn’t realized how often I hit the spacebar to pan around an image, or to select different tools, or just to hit “Tab” key to hide or show the tool palettes.

Another issue is the viewing angle, the position of the head in relation to the screen. Go off-axis and the image dims and loses color saturation and contrast, and the distance between the pen tip and the imaging surface on the screen becomes more pronounced. Keeping your head right in the middle resolves both of these issues, but it isn’t always possible to keep so still.
Also, remember that these are computers, with processors and hard drives and a backlit screen that all generate heat. It’s nothing uncomfortable, but it’s a noticable difference from a pencil and paper. And, also unlike a pencil and paper, a Tablet PC has some weight to it. When drawing, any artist makes adjustments to the position of the paper to make it more comfortable and to better draw a line. These minor adjustments become difficult when you’re drawing on a four- or five-pound notebook with tacky rubber feet.

Should ad agencies be rolling out Tablet PCs to their stables of artists? Not yet. The screen size and resolution may not be suitable for print work. On the other hand, broadcast and Web animators might find this to be a powerful tool in their arsenal. It’s an ideal tool for storyboard and animatic artists, creatives who need to crank out thumbnail sketches with annotations, and anyone who really wants to impress the local coffee crowd by banging out digital caricatures and then emailing them off while enjoying a latté.  

Gateway
Phone: 800-369-1409
Web site: www.gateway.com

 Mike Caputo is the owner of Animation Bureau, an animation and effects studio in New York City for digital and analog media.