Animation - The Whole Story - Revised Edition (2003)

The book Animation The Whole Story is like a guide to creating animated movies. Written by animator, writer and director Howard Beckerman using sketches, photos, diagrams and step-by-step illustrations to guide the reader through a mixture of stages such as ‘Beginning to draw’, ‘Telling the story’ and ‘Building an animated sequence’. This book not only gives guidance to creating animations, but also back history the rise of animation, in terms of how and where it began.
The structure of the book is nicely balanced with easy to follow steps, which is why I plan to use this book for research upon for my essay question. Though there is not much information on comedy here, it is explained simply to the degree that you can even picture what the writer is trying to tell you. It gives you tips on the most important aspects of what makes something funny, such as the timing, the changing of colours, unusual situations to clever dialogue and narration.
From reading a good couple of pages of this book, anyone even thinking of becoming an animator or just thinking of animating, it is greatly advised you go and grab a copy. This is written by someone who drew characters such as Mighty Mouse, Popeye and Heckle and Jeckle, all of which had become successful animations, meaning this guy knows what he is talking about. Also because the format he’s written it in is simple enough for animators of all levels to understand and engage in.

Draw The Looney Toons ((2005) Review

The book Draw The Looney Toons contains information with background on Warner Bros, how they got started, the kind of character animations they used to do which is nothing like it is today and much more. It gives you plenty of tips on anatomy, physics and proportion. It also gives help on composition, staging and attitude, all of this which contains plenty of imagery.
Since this is a book from Warner Bros. they have also included a section which shows you how to draw Bugs Bunny, one of their most popular made characters even to present day. It tells you how to draw every part of his body step by step, but it is not recommended to do until you’ve tried other exercises that exist in previous pages of the book.
This book may seem at first that it will not be of any use, but in fact it will, because Warner Bros. created the characters ‘Tom & Jerry’ whom I will be analyzing for my essay question. Though the book doesn’t focus entirely on Tom & Jerry, it’s the company that I can really talk about, defining the way they make their characters and how they can generate comedy out of it, without any or very little use of dialogue, and the way that they exaggerate body movement as well, which is one of the keys to generating comedy.
I believe that I will find this book very useful for not just my research, but for also understanding the mechanics of one of the largest corporations of producers for film and television.

Cinema Studies - The Key Concepts - Third Edition (2006)

The Book Cinema Studies is a book that covers a huge variety of aspects related to film, cinema, film and even theatre. However it covers a lot more than meets the eye, it also contains information on points such as cultural studies, Disney productions and comedy. It also has a lot of sections that you wouldn’t think would be revised upon, such as photography or computer graphic imaging (CGI). They also focus on film industries in countries around the globe, on what genre they first emerged as when they came into the cinema and film world. For example, Brazil came to cinema in the 1950’s, producing documentaries blending history, myth and popular culture.
Though this book doesn’t really focus an animation what-so-ever, I thought that I would use this book for my research as a ways to compare the views and information gathered by two different sides of the industries. Even though I am looking at comedy in animation, the points made from say animators in the animation industry may be totally different to that of what the film makes in the film industry believe.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who needs to look up detailed information on cinema and film, or anything even related to it. Even animation students are advised to use this book when ever possible, even though it doesn’t have much information on animation itself, it’s still good to obtain knowledge of film and cinema because they are more or less two sides of the same coin.

Understanding Animation (Paul Wells 1998) Review

The book Understanding Animation is an informative book that gives the reader a variety of knowledge from what it is, its history all the way to how it is evolving today. To be more exact, it basically covers all the different areas of animation, with views from all aspects from different animators, to scientists and audiences responses to all this.
The book covers a range of topics such as ‘The problem with realism’ which focuses on how live action differs from animation on a number of levels, ‘What is animation?’ which goes into detail on exactly what animation is.
I will be covering question three of the essay assignment, in which this will cover the aspects of comedy. This book which covers many areas, no doubt has plenty of information in comedy, and black humour.
I have found this book useful to me in the past before, but I focused on a different factor in the book, that being ‘realism’ which was of interest to me because I wanted to define the differences between live-action and animation. The structure of the book is quite simple to navigate around, and with use of the index as well you get to see how much is contained in this reasonably sized book. I would defiantly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for information on the art form that is animation, as it covers a majority of fields in detail. I personally like this book very much and I no doubt feel that I will be going back to reading this book many times in the future for future help and reference.

Pierre Bonnard - The Window (1925) Review

Pierre Bonnard (2 October 1867 - 23 January 1947) was a French painter and printmaker, and was also a member of the Les Nabis, a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists in France in the 1890s. He is well know for using intense colours, in which he specifically targets areas built with small brush marks and close values. Most of his paintings would feature friends or family along with room interiors and gardens, making them both narrative and autobiographical. However it was his wife Marthe that was more or less the true subject of his paintings, in which she has been seen in a variety of situations, from sitting at a kitchen table, to being nude and also look out from a balcony as is featured in the painting that I am reviewing.
When it comes to landscapes and environments I can’t really help but like them, and this painting is no different. I especially like the way it shows how much depth there is, as you can see the window of a room for the foreground and then it just happens to expand outwards revealing a entire town and hills. This in my view creates it’s own ‘world’ within the painting, which somehow I can end up looking at this picture for hours and not get bored with it. Apparently Pierre intended to frame the landscape with the window and doorways, submitting the abundance of nature to human control, which when told this, you can actually see that meaning perfectly.

Jan Svankmajer - Meat Love (1988) Review

Jan was born and raised in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), and is a Czech Surrealist artist and is know for his surreal or some would say wired animations and features, influencing other artists of the likes of Tim Burton, The Brothers Quay and many more. A lot of his works consist of inanimate objects moving and coming to life though the use of stop motion, and clay animation, though he tends to use more live action than any of the previous two. It is because of these distinct features that he has gained a reputation for over several decades, and is even still admired to the present day.
The film short ‘Meat Love’ is a live action/stop motion short which is only just over a minute long and is as the title suggests, two pieces of meat that happen to fall in love, make love, and then end up getting cooked in a frying pan. A lot of different feelings and emotions are cramped in to just a minute short, for example it is wired because with two pieces of meat that have been cut you wouldn’t expect them to just start moving around on their own. Also he manages to create some comedy as well, which helps take away the tense moment when you first see the meats come alive.
I was a bit unpleased to see that it was only a minute long, but at the same time after I watched it at home a few times over I could see that Jan structured it very well, he didn’t beat around the bush in terms of the narrative. We got introduced to what was supposedly the characters (being the meat), an event or two happened and finally the conclusion or round up to the story, nothing more and nothing less. I recommend anyone I know to watch this, whether they want to watch something that will make them think ‘that’s wired’ or even just to get a little giggle out of it.

10 links to Amazingly interesting sites

http://www.3dstudiomaxtutorials.com/ - A 3D tutorial site, with a huge variety of sections to pick from.

http://www.arildwiro.com/ - Another 3D Tutorial site that goes into detail on creating the human body, from the whole body to sections like hands, feet, ears etc.

http://www.deviantart.com/ - One of the most popular community websites for submitting artwork, gaining feedback and meeting new people.

http://drawsketch.about.com/library/weekly/aa112402a.htm - usefull site on how to draw hands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6vBrLAUjbA - Marek Denko's moving stills, an amazing 3d artist! you won't believe it was 3d created!! :S

www.sega.com/valkyria/ - Playstation 3 Game that I really enjoy and admire, not just because of its battle system that is uniqie to others, but because of the way they used watercolour based techniques to create everything from characters to the enviroment, taking animation to a different and fresh direction. They use what is called the 'Canvas Graphics Engine'.

http://www.imdb.com/ - Internet movie database for looking up movies or actors and actresses. Also of the directors, producers etc who worked on titles and what they done in the past.

http://www.gamershell.com/ - Games site that consists of game reviews, demo and patch downloads and community forums.

http://fierymonk.deviantart.com/gallery/ - One of the many members of devianart but has obtained copies of storybaords on 'Avatar - The Legend Of Aang' a very popular and recognised amercian cartoon, very good to see the works behind the scenes and how they develop their ideas.

http://forums.creativecow.net/ - A usefull website that features tutorials for many used programs, especially for animators and such alike. Features events, blogs, a newspaper and magazine along with podcasts.