Interview with the Art Director

How was working with the TAB? Actually I didn’t use it myself, but at a first look it is amazing… Amazing? Yes, there are some very new tools, I’ve never seen anything similar in a vector-based software. The way you can modify lines is very soft, is… I’d say absolutely handy. Also the camera is extremely easy to use, almost toy-like. In a demo I saw that It takes a few minutes to make a little animation, from the sketch of a character to a camera movement. So time is the reason why you chose the TAB, right? Actually time spare is part of the reason. The full reason is the image quality you can get in a very short time. We know high-end professional software for 2D animation, with hundreds of functions more, effects, etc, but they are much more complex to learn and to use. When I realized that the TAB had the right tools for what I need, I regretted I didn’t know about it before. If I had met the TAB a few months earlier I would have avoided my last summer production nightmare… What do you mean by image quality? In the TAB you find styles, like special brushes, which look raster, like something you could get scanning an airbrush painting or with a software like Photoshop, but in the TAB they are vector-based so very easy and quick to be animated, and you don’t have to scan anything. Many other features make a high image quality: variable thickness lines, effects for filled area, textured strokes and more.

You said you know high-end professional software…
Yes, we mainly work with Quantel and Avid.

And you really think TAB is good enough to accomplish broadcast quality?
Yes, in spite of its price. It depends of course on the kind of stuff you’re working on. For works like this one, once you have vector-based drawings, the final image quality is a matter of tools you use to output the movie and that’s it.

Did the TAB influence the final budget?
Yes, dramatically! The budget for a full 3D production was at the end 10 times higher than the one needed to complete the job with the TAB.

Did you run the TAB on a powerful workstation?
No, our freelance animator worked at home on his PC, not a very powerful system I think . That’s why the Flash SWF format was very convenient to send us some animation tests, it helps a lot when you work in separate locations.

What do you think about the TAB price?
I think it is pretty right. We are used to much higher prices, high-end composers we mentioned before are very expensive. So, comparing features and price, TAB is cheap… cheap but precious!

Is there any future project you are going to develop with TAB?
Yes, we are already using Tab for the linetest of another animation, it will be the animated logo of a movie distributor.

What do you like most in the TAB?
The way you can draw, handily.

What do you like least in the TAB?
We miss a text function because in 2.0 there is not a type tool, but I know that in TAB 2.1 there will be one.