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Gallery > Two Bits (1989)

In 1989 there weren't any computer animation courses out there. In fact, aside from the excellent offerings of Sheridan College there weren't any animation courses anywhere. We worked on Steenbecks and 3/4" video bays. It was in this year I saw Pixar's Tin Toy and decided I would one day get into computer animation. I was a Media Arts student at Ryerson University studying film and lighting, and having fun with storyboards and spec-produced TV commercials.

I bought my first computer for use strictly as an animation tool. The software I picked up was Videoscape 3D written by Allen Hastings. Videoscape and Modeler would go on to become Lightwave on the Video Toaster.

Image courtesy Dean A. Scott

Videoscape offered a few cool tools including the ability to move primitive shapes from keyframe to keyframe. (Wow!) You could make the shapes any colour from a palette of 64. There was no interface.

As with any animated short, Two Bits began as a series of storyboards and concept art.

The story involved two computer viruses who have to put their differences aside and fight the new, evil, monster-virus. Hey, remember this was not long after Tron!

From there I went to Modeler to create my characters based, if possible, on primary objects like balls, boxes and cones. In some cases, as with the "Onionhead" character's bow tie, I took out the graph paper and meticulously traced out Cartesian co-ordinates to create solid geometry. I would key it in from a spreadsheet and press render, hoping for the best with no errors.

The backgrounds were created with a wonderful (at the time) paint program called DigiPaint. It offered the innovative HAM program (Hold And Modify) that cheated the computer into using a palette of 4096 colours from a base of only 32 colours. I created some lovely art directed scenes including the famous "Leroy's Donut Shop", deep in the heart of the 6510 CPU.

The computer was only capable of playing out about 10 frames per second with the high colour palette I was using, which meant the six minute film used only 3600 frames. Today, that would be finished at 352 x 240 in about four hours, but in 1989 I developed, to my knowledge, the first private render farm in Toronto. It was comprised of computers in Toronto and Mississauga headed by two friends Marc Cukier and Paul Baron. We met daily and swapped source discs on floppy: I would provide a new scene and geometry, and they would give me a box of floppy disks full of images. This went on for well over two weeks and cost me a fortune in floppy disks and TTC transit tokens! To this day I still have those floppy disks - there are about 200 of them.

Once I got closer to completion, I called on a good friend and very talented musician Tuncer Turkeli. He took my storyboards and very vague direction and came up with a stunning soundtrack, a hybrid of traditional instruments and synthesizer. Tuncer also did the sound effects, like the sound of a neon light (his work desk fluorescent lamp) and the arrow character bouncing (his own voice). One of my room-mates at the time Marko Pidhirsky, lead of the rockabilly band The Burnin' Hellbillies, wrote the theme for Leroy's Donuts. He was practicing into a cheap cassette recorder and I just took that cassette into the edit suite and used it raw. Everyone loves that part of the film - it's become a true classic.

The film was my third year project at Ryerson and won several awards. It was featured at the National Museum of Science and Technology a number of times, and I understand if you visit the National Archives of Canada and type my name, Two Bits comes up as in the library. Cool!

Click here to view Two Bits without credits. 2.75M Quicktime.

Written, Directed and Animated by
RICK DOLISHNY

Music & Sound Effects
TUNCER TURKELI
MARKO PIDHIRSKY

Location Rendering Supervisors
PAUL BARON
MARC CUKIER

Craft Services
MARC CUKIER

Creature Design
DEAN HANNAS
MARKO PIDHIRSKY

Special Thanks
DON GILLIES, RYERSON
COLETTE MORIN, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Rendering
ARDEE PRODUCTIONS COMPUTER ANIMATION