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Actors on Betacam
The characters in Next Space are not drawn. They are real people whom the authors filmed with a Betacam camera on a playground in Dúbravka (a district of Bratislava) and then cut out of the footage by hand, frame by frame.
When Frank walks down the green corridor of G-HERN’s station, he looks as if he belongs there. That is not something to take for granted. Frank, after all, is a flesh-and-blood human being captured on camera, while the corridor is a computer-generated scene. Combining these two worlds into a single image in 1996 was a craft – and one that took a great deal of patience.
What Betacam is
Betacam is a professional analogue video format from Sony. Television studios used it from the 1980s onwards, and it was still standard for news and reportage in the 1990s. The video was recorded on half-inch tapes and was of very good quality: much better than the VHS camcorders that every other household had at the time.
For the game, this meant good-quality source footage to work from.
What digitisation means
A camera stores the picture as an analogue signal that changes continuously over time. A computer, however, understands only numbers. Digitisation is the conversion from one to the other: the picture is split into frames (25 per second in television), each frame into pixels, and each pixel is given a colour number. Today every phone does this.
In general, the process has these steps: film the actor on camera, play the tape into a computer, pick out the individual frames, cut the character out of them, scale it down to its in-game size and reduce the colours to the few shades the game has room for.
How it was filmed
As Peter Hegyi recalls, the actors were not filmed in a studio. Filming took place outdoors in Bratislava-Dúbravka, on a children’s playground, with a Betacam camera. The camera was operated by Ján Valent, who is credited with video production.
It has not been possible to establish which card was used to digitise the video, or how long the filming took.
Why no green screen
In film and television, the usual way to place people in a different setting is a green or blue screen. The actor stands in front of a vivid green background and the computer “erases” that colour. This is called chroma key, and if the scene is well lit it usually works automatically.
For Next Space the actors were filmed without a green or blue screen. This has one consequence: no computer can tell where the character ends and the playground behind them begins. The authors therefore had to cut out every frame by hand, pixel by pixel, in Autodesk Animator – judging by the data, most probably in its Animator Pro version. This craft is known as rotoscoping.
Why Animator Pro and not the original Animator? All the animations that survive in the game files are in the FLC format, which is Animator Pro’s format. The original Animator saved only the smaller FLI format, with a resolution of at most 320 × 200 pixels, whereas the films in the game are 640 × 480. The headers also contain the serial number of a copy of Animator Pro and a path to a file with the .CEL extension, which Animator Pro uses for pieces cut out of an image. This does not, however, prove anything about the game’s characters themselves: they are stored in the game in a format of their own, so this is an inference, not a certainty. There are more details on the How the Graphics Were Made page.
How many frames there were
The game files contain the following:
| What | Count |
|---|---|
| Character animation sets (DANIM files) | 17 |
| Character frames used in the game | 601 |
| Of which distinct (excluding repeats and mirror copies) | 456 |
| Of which Frank (8 directions of 11 frames each) | 88 |
| Frames including unused set no. 13 | 617 |
Only Frank, an android, a guard, the barman, a cloned guard and a robot have eight walking directions of 11 frames each (88 in total). The remaining sets are single-direction special animations, mostly Frank on a barrel and in the water in the sewer. Frames range from about 125 pixels tall (Frank) to almost 200 (the largest sets). Just 22 colours were enough for the whole of Frank.
Of these frames, 514 are distinct, or 456 once mirror copies are merged: in each of the barman’s left/right direction pairs, one direction was made by flipping the other, and almost the same goes for the cloned guard. Other frames of people (Frank at work, the androids, the guards, the barman at the bar) are part of the room animations and are not included in this count (see How many frames repeat).
Who played whom
As Peter Hegyi recalls, Frank was played by Roman Macko, the barman by Peter Hegyi, both androids by Zuzana and Katarína Horňáčková (known within the team as Zuzka and Katka), and the guard in the grey coat with the rifle by Pavel Ondrejka. The other characters have not been identified yet.
The game’s credits list these people in front of the camera: Roman Macko, Peter Hegyi, Michal Hegyi, Pavel Ondrejka, Katarína Horňáčková, Zuzana Horňáčková, Viktor Buzinkay, Ján Valent and “other creatures…”.
The voices in the Slovak version belong to Vlado Zetek, Ivan Gontko, Agáta Solčianská, Jaro Strunga, Rado Skaličan and Juraj Hegyi. According to Peter Hegyi, the Juraj Hegyi in the credits is the same person as the founder of MAXTECH, the company that published the game (see Magic Systems). We do not know who voices which character. See Characters.
Why this matters
In 1990s computer games, characters often got onto the screen in one of two ways. They could be drawn (as in the classic LucasArts adventures) or rendered in 3D (see How the Graphics Were Made). A third way, digitised real actors, was demanding. Period context: fighting games such as Mortal Kombat used it too. Next Space chose this route and pulled it off without even a green screen.
You can see the result in every step Frank takes: his movement has a human rhythm that is hard to reproduce by drawing.
Slovak voices – sample lines