I used to be a big fan of Fantasy and Science Fiction novels (nowadays I just occasionally read the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy). And even though I don't consider myself as being any good at painting or designing graphics I tried to paint people and landscapes with paper and pencil. When you work as a conscientious objector in a hospital you have a lot of time to spend on stuff like painting or reading.

At home I was usually programming demos for the CPC and tried to write games as well. My demos usually lived on software effects with little graphics whatsoever. So instead of creating a new software effects demo I thought I could give it a shot with something new. So I thought about creating a graphics demo where the main focus was on the graphics and the animation and comparatively little programming had to be done.

With a weird, romantic sense of fantasy I figured that it would be cool if I created a scene at a small pond in deep forest. A small waterfall supplies the pond with water on the one side and a river exits from the other side disappearing in the back (of course the waterfall, the surface of the pond and the river was supposed to be animated).

The script for that animation was that a warrior would be approaching from within the forest. He obviously comes directly from a battle, he looks beaten and wounded; blood is smeared over this armor and face. He stops at the pond, kneels down, dives his hands into the water and drinks a few hands full of water. Then he startles, because he heard a sound. He looks around and then suddenly gets up and runs away. The scene would end the same way as it had started, that is you see the pond, the waterfall and the river. Butterflies are flying around, you hear the buzzing of bees and the wind in moving the boughs and leafs of the trees.

There isn't much of a story, I admit. But I thought that this would be more than enough work already and that writing a better story also involved painting a lot more graphics - something I wasn't sure I would be able to do. I knew that I wasn't such a gifted artist and I thought I should start with something small.

I had already figured out that the memory of the CPC would be too small to hold all this graphics, so I was thinking about splitting the main character into several different parts that could be animated separately. That meant that I didn't have to paint a complete new warrior graphics for every little movement he performs. I just had to change these parts of the graphics that actually do change. This meant less memory usage and also less computing time, since painting just a little sprite on the screen takes a lot less time than updating large parts or the whole screen.

I tuned out that the script I had written was already too much for my graphics talent. After painting about six different animation phases of my main character I lost the interest in continuing with this project. I figured that I had to paint several hundreds of different animation phases to make this movie work out as planned and it took me several days to even paint these six. So I decided that my time was put to a much better use, when I restarted writing software based demos instead of graphics shows.

The remains of this effort is a screen with the six and somewhat animation phases of the warrior bending down to drink some water.