Animation for the Web: a balancing act between creativity and limited bandwidth

Post, July, 2003 by Christine Bunish

"Animation has a huge future on the Web," forecasts Ray McCall, executive director of Nexterra, Inc. and an associate professor in the University of Colorado's department of planning and design. "We're seeing just the bare minimum now.

Currently, file size, download time and compatibility are issues limiting greater use of animation on the Web. But as more computer users move from modems to broadband, self-imposed or technology-imposed restrictions on Web animation will start to disappear.

EXPLORING MARS

Non-profit, Boulder, CO-based Nexterra uses its own Web site (www.exploremarsnow.org) as a presentation device for space-habitation design with an initial focus on Mars.

"We all have a long history of being fanatical about designing things for space exploration," says McCall. "One of us has a 25-year history as VP of a NASA contractor; another is an architect of the Mars Arctic Research Station, Dane Spangler majored in spacehabitat design, and I'm primarily a software designer."

McCall says the current Web site is "merely the first stage of a full-blown animated site. To educate and engage people on the potentials and problems of Mars exploration, the Web site had to have animation on it, and we tried to reach everyone with a 56K modem. So we resorted to a big bag of tricks to give the illusion of live scenes and animations on the site."

McCall and colleagues knew dynamic html would be "grossly inadequate" to the task and "almost everybody was working in Flash, which is vector-based animation." But the Nexterra team wanted to use raster-based animation for which "the books said Flash was the wrong tool." They felt composited, raster-based animation could give the impression of large-scale video on the computer screen.

The Nexterra pioneers used Flash 5, which McCall says is "on about 95 percent of the browsers out there," so the Web site could reach a big audience. They created photoreal renderings of still images layered with small animations -- a door opening, an astronaut walking into the distance, flags flapping in the breeze, habitat beacon lights flashing on and off -- to give the impression of capturing a live scene.

"Stills lend themselves better to navigation, collecting information and learning about science and technology. That's hard to do with a constantly-moving image," says Spangler. "All the education happens by walking through the [Mars] habitat We didn't want a lot of preloaders to disrupt the continuity of the site."

Spangler, Nexterra's creative director and an instructor at the Art Institute of Colorado, used high-end Form Z for photoreal rendering, Strata 3D Pro for rendering and Adobe Photoshop for compositing. He employed Corel's Bryce 5 for realistic landscapes and terrain. Additional compositing was done in Flash.

"Flash has made spectacular progress as a product," attests McCall. "It's turned out to be an incredible resource. Flash MX now has a full-blown programming language in it."

As a result the next-generation Nexterra Web site, which McCall expects will be launched in mid-2004, will be "more interactive, more participatory with more animations. We'll move from the passive TV model to where you're really doing things on the site."

GIFS VS. FLASH

Animation on the Web has many of the same limitations as video on the Web, notes KC. Wheelwright, multimedia designer at Visual Graphics (www.visualg.com) in Mukilteo, WA. "There are restrictions in both pixel dimensions and file size. Animation has to be dynamic and add interest without overloading and render in the correct frame rate without being choppy or sluggish. And you need to get the same results from various machines -- from the computer you develop it on to the computer the average person sees it on."

Web animations "have an additional level of involvement: the integration of functionality as part of interfaces and online applications. Integration of Web animations occur in programmed behaviors and actions like the common rollover effect," he explains.

The real challenge of Web animation is maintaining creativity in the face of technical limitations. "I have a tendency to chalk designs full of stuff, then have to bring them down to earth to make them feasible for the Web," Wheelwright admits.

While Wheelwright acknowledges that "Flash has been the standard for dynamic Web animation for a while," it's still a plug-in which could have fierce competition from another standard offered on a browser. So he frequently uses universally-compatible GIF animations. "They're not as smooth [as Flash animations] since there's no real memory management or aliasing capabilities or anything dynamic about the way GIFs handle animation," he says. "But I tend to use them when the client isn't comfortable with the requirement that fend users] have the [Flash] plug-in to view the site."

Wheelwright reports that email marketing is "huge" and growing, and for these projects GIF animations are a must. "You can't see Flash in Outlook or html mail unless you lower security settings. But GIF is 100 percent compatible" with all email formats.