Article Focus:
Brian C. Barnes takes a look at [digital] Cinematography & Directingby Dan Ablan and published by New Riders Publishing. Brian recommends this book to anyone that is looking for an overview and insight into the entire 3D animation process.
[Digital] Cinematography & Directing is another in the New Riders series [digital]. The other books in the series, Texturing & Painting, Lighting & Rendering, and Character Animation, all take a fairly deep look at their respective subjects. The subject of this book, however, is somewhat wider. There are many aspects to cinematography and directing, and this book gives a fairly good overview of many of them, such as storyboards, lighting, staging, editing, sound, using the [digital] camera, and character direction. The books 225 pages cover each of these topics in enough detail that you will be able to gain a good working knowledge, but the real benefit in my opinion is that while the other books concentrate on the technique, this book also touches on the “art” of storytelling. Once you finish this book, you will have a good starting point for further research into any or all of these areas.
There are many practical examples and illustrations in this book, but there are no tutorials. In many books, I’ve found the tutorials to be a hindrance as much as a help, since they rarely target my chosen 3D modeling application, Cinema4D. Translating from the usual Maya, Lightwave, or 3DS Max tutorials, can be bothersome and confusing because of differences between these applications. I do not consider the lack of tutorials in [digital] Cinematography and Directing to be a problem. The subject matter and the illustrations provide ample understanding of the material, and the space that would otherwise be consumed by only partially useful tutorials is instead better used in conveying the concepts of the various topics in the book.
I enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone that is looking for an overview and insight into the entire 3D animation process. I also think that it would be very useful to those like myself, who feel that there is “something missing” from the animated stories and images we create, but just can’t put a finger on what it might be.
COW Rating:
I rate this book 4 cows out of 5. While I enjoyed reading it, I did find myself stumbling over a few too many typos and grammar problems for my taste.
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