Making of ...

Above all, the development of Animation & Dance is connected with my hobby "dancing". As I moved for professional reasons repeatedly, I learned new figure sequences in different dancing schools - and forgot the old dancing steps. Therefore I tried to find possibilities to document the dance sequences and to make it accessible for everyone.

The idea to Animation & Dance emerged many years ago when the first computer-animated cartoons as "Toy story" (1996), "Antz" (1998) and "Shrek" (2001) came into the movie theaters. At this time I already had generated my own pictures with the freeware-renderer "POV-Ray". The scenes I assembled in the generic description language of the program with geometric basic elements. As I also had a lot of experience with Pascal / Delphi, I began to develop a program, that should calculate the scenes fully automatic.

From that the program system "StepWin" emerged, with which of all the body positions of the dancers can be edited in a flexible manner. Several keyframes are put together to short dance sequences. The intermediate positions are calculated automatically. By combination of several dance sequences a dance video is created, that describes the complete movement flow, for example the "Natural Turn" in Viennese Waltz. In addition I programmed a little synthesizer, that produces the rhythm of the dance.

As a result of the calculations, "StepWin" generates the scenes-files for POV-Ray. Also the before chip and after chip of the film are designed. The scenes are rendered automatically with POV-Ray and can be joined subsequently with the audio file to a short film. In order to minimize the transmission-volume, I store the films in the size 240*180 pixel in the (loss marked) MPEG-4 format. In addition I also render the films with 128*96 pixel in the 3GP format in order to enable the representation on mobile phones.