FANTAVISION IS THE SECOND in a series of mouse operated programs produced by Broderbund. The first of these was Dazzle Draw. When I saw Dazzle Draw I thought that Broderbund had reached the top in mouse operated programs, but they have made Fantavision even better. The program works on the principle that you make one picture at a time, and then after you have made all the pictures that you want, you flip them over one by one.

A good example to illustrate this would be to start off with a man in a standing position, and then in the next series of pictures keep the body in the same position but move his legs. When the "Movie" was finally run it would look as though the man was walking. This idea is obviously a simple one. On the Show Disk there are more complicated ones, eg a fish swimming and breathing.

The Main Menu looks like this:

= [ FANTAVISION MENU } =

M - Mouse

G - Graphics Tablet

K - Koala Pad

J - Joystick

C - Create A Show Disk

Q - Quit This Menu

The advantage with this menu is that it supports more than the mouse. The problem that you might encounter with using the joystick is that you can never get it to stay in one place, so that makes it difficult to use the menus.

The menus on the top of the screen are FILE, EDIT, GOODIES. The options for FILE range from Loading and Saving Movies or Backdrops to Formatting a Disk.

The options for EDIT are the things that makes the program so easy to use - they are Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Clone and Zap. Although these options are not used very often, they come in very handy sometimes.

The options for GOODIES are Zoom, Turn, Lean, Flip and Squash. These options add variety to the movie. My overall impressions of Fantavision are very favourable because it is like a little Movie Maker. Fantavision excels any other mouse operated program but there is one drawback, and that is that you cannot Print out a picture. That is easily overcome by making a screen dump, which is what I've done to illustrate the main idea behind Fantavision. (See Picture 1).

In my opinion the program is worth buying and is also the best program released in 1985.

(For the 64k Apple II+, IIe, IIc. Price $79.95. Distributed by Imagineering, (02) 662 4499.)

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