This year at the International Animation Film Market of Annecy (MIFA), TVPaint presents its 2D animation software created in 1991 by Hervé Adam. The software, originally produced for AMIGA computers, performed its software's function by integrating video editing and drawing softwares and joining new features.
It becomes from 1996 a bitmap animation software which allows at the same time to imitate traditional renderings (gouache, watercolor, crayon, Chinese brush) but also to create storyboards, animatics, to manage camera moves and Lipsync. It also contains some FX functions. This software allows to work on all the stages of an animated production, from first sketch pre-production until the beginning of the compositing.
TVPaint then interested American distributors. ''3D LightWave'' creators NewTek redistributed at first TVPaint by renaming it "Aura". Some people in NewTek then created Bauhaus company software and renamed "Aura" into "Mirage", which was widely distributed in North America between 2003 and the end of 2005 (for United States and Canada).
A disagreement between the software distributor Bauhaus and TVPaint, whose head office and development department were based in Lorraine since the beginning, pushed to a breach of contract between both companies. In 2006 TVPaint created its commercial department, became totally independent and returned its initial name to its technology.
TVPaint purpose to combine all stages of a movie production without changing environment (storyboard, animation, colorization). An electronical stylus and a touch screen allow to keep the comfort of the traditional drawing by saving line test or scan tasks, or animation cleaning for colorization. One of the strenghts of TVPaint is not to be vectorial. The drawn lines are not recalculated by the software, which is appreciated by the traditional animators.
''Cartoon Saloon'' (Ireland) realized the storyboard, the animatics and the animation on TVPaint for its full-length film " Song of The Sea ", available in France the end of 2014.
The National Film Board of Canada, Cackleberries or Bardel's animation studios as well as numerous schools of Quebec as the university of Concordia use TVPaint's licenses. Blizzard Entertainment (''World Of Warcraft'') and Rovio (''Angry Birds'') also use it for video games, kinematics or animated series.
TVPaint is a small team of 5 commercial developers and 5 technicians working on the technical support and regular updates. The team will be present in August at the Hiroshima festival in Japan, in November at the CTN exhibition in Burbank, California and at the Cartoon Forum in Toulouse in September.
Alain Andrieux
