This week, Ricky shares his review of the Adobe Premiere update in the CS4 package, Phil expresses some frustration about Circuit City, and then the two discuss (at great length) encoding practices as they relate to getting good results from various video sharing destinations.
Check out Reallusion’s Japanese website grand opening!
Paperback: 155 pages
Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions (MWP)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1932907424
ISBN-13: 978-1932907421
Product Dimensions: 27.7 x 18.8 x 1.3 cm
The second edition of this classic is even better than the first. It’s subtitled: “Great Camera Moves Every Filmmaker Should Know”, and indeed it contains a great deal of information that some people pay a lot of money to learn in film school.
Not that a book can replace a class necessarily, but there are tried and true shots, methods and techniques for making a film. Yes, story is important, but there are certain ways of doing things, certain types of shots, that are very important to know. Some of these aren’t obvious (which is sort of the point), but which help move story along visually in a way that helps people to enjoy what they are watching.
With the falling price of video cameras, computerized editing and the rise of sites on which to share videos, it seems like everyone is busy shooting a movie of some sort, be it a kid’s birthday party, a friend’s wedding, a sporting event, or something more ambitious like a documentary or a feature. And it’s not just filmmakers or videographers which will find the book valuable. This book is very helpful for cartoonists, sequential artists, animators and pre-viz artists too.
Jose Cruz is both an illustrator and a storyboard artist, and his images really convey Jeremy Vineyard’s jargon-free explanations. It’s important to know not just the how, but also the why. It’s always helpful to see explanations in action and this book accomplishes this by using examples from well-known movies. Imagine being to be able to watch a movie on DVD, using the remote to pause at a scene and then referring to the book to see how it was done, and understand why.
While only 155 pages, this book contains a wealth of information. It covers basic cinematic techniques, composition techniques, crane techniques, techniques of movement, techniques of perspective, specific camera techniques and editing techniques as well as a very long list of miscellaneous techniques. Because its value is not just in being instructional, but also serving as a reference guide, it doesn’t have to be read from the first page to the last page, one can just jump in anywhere. The six-and-a-half index is especially helpful as it contains the names of movies (several hundred spanning more than a century of filmmaking). This makes it easy to look up a particular film, flip to the right page, and see how a certain shot was made.
“Setting Up Your Shots” is designed in a ‘wide-screen’ format, just like a movie, and can easily be slipped into a Ziploc baggie and tossed into a backpack and taken along on a shoot.
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions (MWP)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1932907491
ISBN-13: 978-1932907490
Product Dimensions: 27.7 x 18.8 x 1.8 cm
Sheridan College is famed world-wide for its award-winning animation programs (Computer Animation, Digital Character Animation, Digital Visual Effects.). Full disclosure: I took their one year Media Fundamentals program. Author Ellen Besen, who has been working in the field for over 35 years, is a former faculty member, while illustrator Bryce Hallett is a Sheridan graduate and has enjoyed a very active career working on a variety of films, music videos and tv shows. This is important because it shows the publisher’s commitment to putting out a book written by people in the industry and ‘in-the-know’.
Many people are lucky enough to go to animation or film school, but not everyone does. Some people take a class here and there, while other people are completely self-taught. I have mixed feelings about the value of going to film school. These days, with the advent of less expensive, but still-powerful computers, and the wide variety of software available, some of it free or very cheap, as well as alternate distribution channels (YouTube, Vimeo, bittorrent, burning one’s own DVDs, etc), it’s easier than ever to actually make an animated film. Whether or not it’s any good is another matter.
Story is still important, but so is knowing how and why to do things when making an animated film. People who don’t go to school don’t always have the benefit of knowing these ’secrets’, and often have to learn by trial and error, if ever. Subtitled: “100 Principles Every Animator, Comic Book Writer, Filmmaker, Video Artist, and Game Developer Should Know”, it is exactly that. This solid widescreen style 245-page book covers subjects like ideas, scripts, storyboards, film structure, sound, animation techniques, performance, timing and special effects.
This handsomely-designed and beautifully-illustrated book will serve as an instructional guide, and also for a reference for years to come.
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