Animating with PAP

Hello,

Let's say goodbye to January and welcome the warm February. Jogja is getting warmer, in fact. I've been waiting for rainy days since Sunday it poured lightly only on midnight for about 15 minutes. The rest were warm and humid hours, our fan in the studio set on the maximum speed and I feel better inside the Transjogja bus, they provide cool breezed air-conditioner and nice-warm seats as well.

I'd like to write a bit about this handy software we were using on Rara and The Ricketies, PAP. Plastic-Animation-Paper version 4.0. Sincerely, it's handy. Let's talk about it slowly, shall we?

Get it from and put it on

You may type 'plastic animation paper' on the search engines you trust and you'll be directed to this link. We could freely download the PAP from the site and install it without any annoying demands or reminders to buy something from them. A very huuuge thanks to the Danish company that made it for free :D ...

It doesn't need expensive requirements for the hardwares. My slow Brazos 1,65Ghz-2GB memory-dedicated HD6470M can do the job. It runs on Win2000/XP (does on Win7 as well) or Linux, yet I don't know the installation proccess for the latter. Also, you'd need a drawing tablet to draw: wacom, genius pen tablet, etc.

The installation is quite fast: get a coffee, sip it, and put the mug back where it used to, and your installation is done. It takes only 15mb of your hard drive.

User interface

It didn't take a very long time for me to learn tools and how-to. My colleague told me the basic instruments and I suppose we all can find the how-to by ourselves. PAP site also provides tutorials, though I've never visited it since I first used this software *chuckle.

Let's see, sketches, cleaning-ups, cut-copy-paste, rotate the canvas, set frame rate, layers, etc. all you can get for a hand-drawn animation.

Output

This step is the most boring and tiresome of the whole thing. But I think we would expect the same fate in hand-drawn during the exporting or scanning outlines, colorings, composing in the compose softwares, etc.

The native filetype for PAP is in .lap or .pap and there are 7 types of images we could save it to: png, bmp, tif, jpeg, tga, gif, and psd, and 2 types of movies: avi-cinepak and avi-divx. 

I've been exporting our works into .png images then put the colorings by GIMP 2.6.11. Sometimes we used PAP's .avi-cinepak outputs to do the line tests and see if they were good enough before switched them to GIMP. 

Shortly, PAP worth inside your side-pocket if you were into hand-drawn or traditional animation. And I think these are all I can recall from our works with PAPv4.0 in Rara and The Ricketies. Would I remember something, I'll make sure it's posted.

Example video is here :D

enjoy!