Antics3D

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

~ the eulogy ~

Antics3D solved a problem that only exists on a film set. Before shooting an expensive scene you want to see it first, which traditionally meant storyboards drawn by hand or an animator billing by the day. Antics let the director do it personally and in real time, by dropping characters into a room and telling them where to go.

The company started in Cambridge in 2000 as Kelseus, founded by Philip Swinstead. It showed a beta at SIGGRAPH in 2004 and launched the product properly in April 2005 at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, under the name Antics Pre-Viz. The name got shorter later that year when the company renamed itself Antics Technologies.

The pitch was that you did not need to know animation. Tell a character to cross the room and it worked out its own legs. That lowered the floor far enough that the software found users well outside film, in forensic animation for courtrooms and in classroom work.

~ the dossier ~

~ who actually used it ~

At SIGGRAPH 2005 the company shipped V2 with a proper integrated timeline, and the BBC picked it up for its film production training program. The machinima crowd found it too, since a tool for blocking scenes cheaply is also a tool for making films inside a game engine. In December 2007 Antics released a free version.

I was finishing an engineering degree in Ankara while all of this was going on, and previsualization software is something you meet only if you are standing near a film production. Turkish productions were not buying Cambridge previz licenses in 2007.

~ the notice ~

V5 shipped in October 2008. Six weeks later, on 28 November, the homepage at antics3d.com said the software was no longer available and that no future versions were planned. The reason it gave was arithmetic: developing and supporting the product cost more than it brought in. The company had kept offices in three cities and it closed along with the product.

~ the orphans ~

Users did what users do and built a forum, then a blog, to keep talking about a product with no vendor behind it. The final installers sat on a file host for a while afterward. They were no use to anyone new, because installing them wanted a serial number from a company that had stopped existing.

A small vendor ships its best version, posts a note six weeks later, and the people who built their working method on it are left holding files that need a dead company's permission to run.

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