Easter or Passover weekend is a great occasion to spend some quality time with friends and families. Our staff back in Berlin and elsewhere will definitely enjoy the nice weather and do just that!
We took the opportunity and created a nice little slideshow that fits the occasion. Take a look and see how AquaSoft SlideShow 7 teaches an old bunny some new tricks…
How the animation works…
The YouTube video is made from an AquaSoft SlideShow project that contains a fairly small number of sequences in order to achieve the animation. It first starts with a rising sun, continues with some growing grass, introduces a pretty restless bunny and concludes with an Easter egg that reveals a greeting message. The following text details the inner workings of this project (download it here), along with some tips and tricks:
1 – Let the Sun Shine
Sunny Timeline
At first, we create our main slideshow chapter and load a picture showing a blue sky (and some clouds) that serves as the backdrop for the entire show. After that it’s time to add some sunlight: we use a single image file in .PNG format (only PNG supports embedded transparency) and layer it in a separate chapter container on top of the backdrop, in four separate tracks. How do we get the sun to ‘shine’? The magic happens inside the details of these tracks: take a look at the ‘Transparency’ tab inside the object settings for each track and you will discover that all four suns contain an animated transparency curve. That’s all that’s needed.
2 – Green Pastures
Pasture Tracks
Can you hear the grass grow? Unfortunately, this slideshow project doesn’t include any sounds. Fortunately, however, you are blessed with a lively pasture that shows the grass grow!
The pasture chapter and its 19 tracks is really the heart and soul of the project, where most of the action happens. In order to create a more realistic animation, we layered the grass image in seven different tracks. The tracks and chapters containing the egg, the bunny and the flowers are then sandwiched between the grass layers. This creates the illusion that the objects were placed ‘inside the grass’, avoiding being perceived as simply slapped on top of the grass bitmap.
The effect that makes the grass look as it would be growing is achieved with the help of the movement path function for each particular track. You may also notice that each grass track actually starts at a different point in time.
Getting the Bunny to Hop
It’s in the nature of any rabbit to hop all over the place, so our little bunny makes no exception here. We added three tracks to the project in order to animate it across the screen. The first track contains the bunny in its original image, the second track uses the built-in image editing feature that simply mirrors the existing bunny image.
Our bunny hops across 32 movement markers
So how can we turn three tracks with static bitmap images into an animated bunny? The magic is hidden in movement markers and an alternating animated transparency between the two layers.
Alternating transparencies
The bunny in the first track takes turns with the mirrored bunny in the second track. Both hop on the same movement path, but the alternating transparency only shows one bunny at a time. In order to re-create the movement markers of the first bunny, we simply copied the path (a click on the right mouse button directly onto the path reveals the command ‘copy path’) and then pasted it into the track that contains the mirrored animal.
The third track imitates a pair of blinking eyeballs, to instill some life into our furry friend.
Customize it
Want to lay your hands on this SlideShow project and customize it? Download it here and unzip the file EasterShow.zip into a folder. The ZIP archive includes a self-contained player that allows you to replay it, unchanged. The subfolder /Slideshow contains the actual project file ostern_final02.ads (along with all bitmap files) that you can open and edit with AquaSoft SlideShow 7.6 (Ultimate and Premium).
