Antics Technologies

» see antics3d.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Animation software in the 2000s was priced and shaped for specialists. If you needed to show a client what a scene would look like before anyone built it, your options were to hire someone who knew Maya or to draw it badly on paper. Antics3D was aimed at the gap: real-time 3D for art directors and editors, so that a screenplay could be turned into a rough moving version of itself by the person who wrote the brief.

The company was founded in Cambridge in 2000 as Kelseus Ltd by Philip Swinstead, privately owned and privately funded, and it renamed itself Antics Technologies in 2004. It opened offices in London and Los Angeles, which tells you where it thought the customers were: previsualization and storyboarding sit next to film production, not next to software.

There is a name collision worth clearing up before anything else. Antics 2-D Animation is a different product entirely, an animation system dating from 1977 that was supported until 1998. The two share a word and nothing else.

Five versions of Antics3D shipped. There was never a sixth.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the notice ~

What makes this company worth a page is that it wrote its own obituary and left it up. The front page of antics3d.com in January 2009 carries a block headed Important Notice, and it is unusually direct: as of 28th November 2008, Antics3D is no longer available for purchase or download, and subscriptions can no longer be renewed. There will be no future versions of Antics3D beyond the current Version 5.

Then it keeps going, which is the part companies usually skip. All existing owners of Antics3D have a permanent license to the software which will never expire. This includes all license types and all versions of the software. Users were told they would keep free technical support and access to the content library until at least June 2009, and that the Download Center would stay open so anyone could pull their copy down again. The video tutorials were staying on YouTube. The last block on the page is headed Community, and it points at a user-moderated forum someone had set up at previz.yourbb.eu.

What the notice never does is say why. The encyclopedia entry on the company puts it down to development and support costs running past revenue. A trade report at the time tells it differently, tying the same date to a new licensing agreement with a children's animation house called Free-D Pictures, with a separate company being formed to serve specialist markets. Both versions sit on the same day and neither one rules the other out.

~ a license that never expires ~

A perpetual license from a company that has stopped existing is a promise with nobody behind it. In practice it held anyway. A desktop application with no activation server keeps running whether or not anyone is left to honor the paperwork, and Antics3D had no reason to phone home. People who had paid for version 5 went on using version 5 for as long as their Windows machines would run it.

The domain went in the end. By April 2011 antics3d.com was a parking page offering itself for sale under a list of related searches. Somebody had paid for hosting through two and a bit years of that notice, on behalf of customers who had already handed over every pound they were ever going to hand over.

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