With the introduction of Director, MacroMind retains its hold on the lead, and further refines the art of Macintosh animation. Like MacroMind’s earlier product, VideoWorks II, MacroMind Director is based on traditional animation techniques yet manages to cut some remarkable new paths of its own. Director can create simulations, storyboards, and presentations by melding images, graphics, text, and sound. Major improvements in both the handling and generation of artwork streamline and simplify the production of animation.
Staging Events
You can carry out all the steps of creating an animation within a single platform that can be easily output to devices such as color printers, video projectors, and slide makers. Essentially, MacroMind Director demonstrates the same intelligent interface as VideoWorks II. It handles 2-D animations as composited images by placing multiple drawings in layers that traditional animators call sprites (a sprite is a simple animating image within a larger static or moving background). By layering multiple animating elements, Director is more like traditional cel animation than other programs are.
Old-time animators will take to Director like fish to water, while newer initiates will welcome the well-written, nearly-700-page documentation, which includes copious examples and tutorials. Having added dozens of new features, the folks at MacroMind found it necessary to reassign the program’s keyboard shortcuts, but the excellent object-sensitive help file is useful for familiarizing users with these new shortcuts. Shift-Option turns the pointer into a question mark with crosshairs. Just place the crosshairs over a troublesome item, click, and a dialog box tells you all about it. For those of you who just can’t adjust, checking the appropriate box under Preferences revises the shortcuts to match those of VideoWorks II.
Director consists of two modules working together. Overview, the presentation module, enables you to assemble a series of externally produced documents (such as MacPaint and PICT graphics) with animations made inside Director. Transitional effects, such as dissolves and screen wipes, can be added to the sequences to produce a seamless presentation.
Animation is created in the second module. Stage. Images are stored in a database called the Cast. To animate a series of images you position successive cast members on the Stage and record them in the Score. Director’s Score is an editable record, similar to a musical score, of all cel activity in the animation over time. Additional information, such as pacing, sound, and transitional effects, can also be stored here.
Art That Moves
In VideoWorks II, artwork imported from other applications had to travel via the Clipboard or Scrapbook to the Cast. Director’s Cast allows you to import entire scrapbooks directly, circumventing a lot of cut-and-paste commands. Scrapbooks, color palettes, and sound files as well as PICT, MacPaint, and PICS formats can all be imported to Director’s new Cast window. Another timesaving command, Cast to Time, allows you to select a sequence of cast members from the Cast window and move it into the Score, and thus into the animated sequence.
Improvements in the handling of cast members include an extended display that lets you simultaneously view (depending on screen size) up to eight rows of cast members. Also, a nifty hand tool has been added that lets you move cast members to new positions within the Cast window and automatically update the Score to reflect those changes. Cast maintenance has been improved by the addition of two commands: Delete Unused Cast eliminates all members not used in the Score, releasing valuable memory for your animation; Clean Up Cast eliminates empty positions. You’ll really appreciate these maintenance commands when you consider that an 8-bit color animation/sound file can easily run to 600K or 800K.
Auto Animate, arguably the handiest of all the new features, makes it possible to quickly create bar charts, zooming text, scrolling banners, credits, and other animated text effects. You simply choose Auto Animate under the Edit menu, select an effect, type in your message, and bingo — your text flies across the Stage into your animation.
Knowing the Score
The Score has a number of improvements over VideoWorks that help create the illusion of motion. The In-Between Special command is used to move cast members in a nonlinear fashion across the Stage. Instead of simply traveling in a straight line between two points, InBetween Special can arrange a path that carries your players through several points that describe a curve, joining them smoothly into one line. This makes it easy to articulate the irregular path of an object, such as a bird in flight, by selecting the key points in the bird’s trajectory and letting Director automatically fill in the intermediate positions. This curve-fitting technique eliminates hours of frame-by-frame positioning of individual cells. Additionally you can select eases, which add a touch of realistic acceleration and deceleration to an object’s movements. The user can designate, in frames, just how fast an object will ramp up to speed and how fast it will begin to slow to a halt.
The Space to Time command lets you superimpose a sequence of cast members together in a single frame so you can check relative positions before distributing them across several frames in a single channel. This command is especially useful for animating objects that have a particularly continuous motion, such as a bouncing ball.
Fresh Paint
Director’s paint program has been enlarged to offer control over color palettes, as well as a wider selection of tools including single or multiple easels, customizable airbrush, gradient effects, and an eyedropper tool for matching colors. In addition, the Previous and Next arrows at the top of the tool menu let you produce a flip-book effect, enabling you to see a sequence of cast members before actually committing them to the animation.
Reverse, flip, rotate, distort, slant, perspective, darken, lighten, trace edges, and smooth are all available under the Transform menu. The Auto Transform feature is a personal favorite. After you have applied a transfomiation — for example, flip — to a cast member, you can specify the number of steps it takes to change the original cast member into the new one. Auto Transform then creates cast members for those in-between positions and places them in the cast window. One elegant use of this function would be to add what animators call stretch and squash to objects that are the subject of great force. The classic example, illustrated in the first Director tutorial, is a bouncing ball. Using Auto Transform and Distort under the Transform menu, you can make a series of cast members that depict the stretch and squash of a ball hitting a hard surface with great energy.
Sounds Good, Too
Sound from audio digitizers such as Farallon Computing’s MacRecorder can be imported directly into the Cast for inclusion in an animation. The big noise here, however, is Director’s musical instalment digital interface (MIDI), which enables the user to trigger MIDI devices, such as a sequencer, at specific points throughout the animation.
All in all, Director shows that even a good program can be improved. What’s most impressive is MacroMind’s evident desire to be at the center of the desktopvideo revolution. Appendix C of Director’s manual gives an exceptionally clear explanation of what it takes to convert a computer’s output to broadcast video. Director’s sophisticated animation tools make it an ideal program for power users in multimedia industries such as film production, video production, and advertising. This does hot mean that MacroMind excludes the hobbyist, but rather that it intends to cover all bases of the expanding multimedia market while simultaneously defining the future of that market.
Cudlitz, Stuart, Smith, Donald Matthew. (September 1989). MacroMind Director 1.0. Macworld. (pgs. 221-222, 224).
MacroMind Director 1.0
MacroMind, Inc.
Applications
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Director-1-0.dsk
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
