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Reading, watching and playing

In the absence of being together enough to work on stuff and getting into the late night lifestyle of being on holidays for another week, I’ve been reading. A lot.

  • Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. A certain demoscener nagged me to read this. I’m glad he did. It’s a brilliant, insightful book.
  • The Cheeky Monkey by Tim Ferguson (formerly of the Doug Anthony All Stars). A book on how to write narrative comedy which is reassuringly funny. Tim definitely knows his stuff – he demonstrates useful insights about what makes humour work and actually sets exercises within the book to make sure the reader can make use of them. Good stuff!
  • On Writing by Stephen King. Damn good. Nuff said.
  • The Eight Characters of Comedy: A Guide to Sitcom Acting And Writing by Scott Sedita. No, I’m not going to write a sitcom. I was on a comedy kick after Cheeky Monkey. This looked good. It’s more actor-focussed than writer-focussed but it was still an enjoyable read.
  • Thinking Animation by Angie Jones – admonitions on the workflow of 3D animation with much of the wisdom of traditional animation injected in for good measure. A good synthesis.
  • The Five C’s of Cinematography by Joseph V Mascelli – everything you could ever want to know about pointing cameras at people.. well.. maybe. To be honest I think I liked The Filmmaker’s Eye and Cinematic Storytelling better since they were both more story-oriented and more newbie-friendly (“this is why you use shot X; this is an example of shot X; this is where people have successfully broken the rules for shot X”). As a classic, Five Cs was still worth reading all the same – wiser perspectives than my own are all welcome, and it covers both theatrical and documentary shooting in detail.
  • Composing Pictures by Don Graham – another classic by someone who taught many of the Disney guys what they know. I’m still only partway through this, but there’s a lot here to think about; it’s stuff as fundamental as “What do lines on a page actually represent, and how do they represent it?”. I suspect it’s basic art education material, but I never had any formal art education beyond year 8 so I’m catching up. It’ll change the way I look at visual art forever, no doubt.
  • Painting With Light by John Alton – yet another classic written by a legend of films noirs such as The Big Combo. I read through the introduction a few weeks ago but no further. Once I get through the remaining hundred or so pages of Composing Pictures, it’s next on the to-read list.

Only one of those books is actually about animation – the rest are about the broader aspects of imagery (moving or otherwise) and storytelling. I’m still pretty consciously considering that animation is in service of a story, characters, world, ideas, soundtrack, etc. Thinking about it all more holistically and directorially, I suppose. I mean, if I can’t get a good grasp on the fundamentals that underpin what the animation’s actually for, what’s the point of going ahead and doing the animation?

(Or you can call it procrastinating out of a fear of failure – or at least long-term frustration. That’s another way of looking at it. A lot’s changed for me in the last couple of weeks so I’m not laying the boot into myself too hard for choosing to study instead of make stuff.)

Cartoon-wise, I’ve been checking out the first two seasons of The Ren and Stimpy Show. I think I read along the way somewhere that traditional animation is for people who like the drawings more than the acting, and CG is for people who like the acting more than the “drawings”. (It’s all just moving coloured shapes in the end.) In many respects, Ren and Stimpy is still intimidatingly good, but I feel kind of old admitting the gross-out aspect of the show puts my stomach on edge. So it goes.

Game-wise, I played through Gone Home. I feel like that game is going to echo for some time, especially with affordable current-gen virtual reality headsets just around the corner…