So you want to create animation! Where do you start? With an idea. This creative, exercise-packed guide contains examples and idea-generating activities. What tools do you need? Your computer, simple software programs, and your imagination. This book will tell you how to utilize these tools. Must you spend your life savings on your set-up? No. The author's charts and project timelines will guide you and make the overwhelming simple, and keep your shopping lists manageable. With Animation in the Home Digital Studio, amateurs and animation students alike can learn how to create a variety of computer animations: from puppet to clay to pixilated, drawn and cartoon. This book contains a CD-ROM loaded with animation clips and exercises. The book's 8-page color insert illustrates stills from the work of independent animators around the world. The book's guide to resources contains a comprehensive list of contests, shows, societies, organizations, e-zines, and more. Steven Subotnick takes a personal approach to animation. His book is for artists, amateurs, professionals, students, and anyone who wants to use animation as a means of expression. It explains how to create a variety of animations: from puppet to cutout, and from drawn to object animation. Subotnick covers the use of popular software products, including Macromedia Flash, Adobe Photoshop®, Adobe Premiere®, Digidesign ProTools Free, and others.

Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital, focuses on both experimental animation’s deep roots in the twentieth century, and its current position in the twenty-first century media landscape. Each chapter incorporates a variety of theoretical lenses, including historical, materialist, phenomenological and scientific perspectives. Acknowledging that process is a fundamental operation underlining experimental practice, the book includes not only chapters by international academics, but also interviews with well-known experimental animation practitioners such as William Kentridge, Jodie Mack, Larry Cuba, Martha Colburn and Max Hattler. These interviews document both their creative process and thoughts about experimental animation’s ontology to give readers insight into contemporary practice. Global in its scope, the book features and discusses lesser known practitioners and unique case studies, offering both undergraduate and graduate students a collection of valuable contributions to film and animation studies.

The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Švankmajer and Jirí Barta. Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects. In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers. Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.

Offering both hands-on instruction and theoretical information, readers learn about various forms of media, how to choose and make the best use of them, and the techniques used to create a media project. With an emphasis on the creative, aesthetic, and technical aspects of creating media, this new edition sheds light on why the reasonings behind production choices are as important as knowing how to push the right buttons and turn the correct knobs.

This text follows the animation production by concentrating on the documentation necessary to accurately and professionally organize each step of the process. Examples of each piece of paperwork needed to complete the project will be shown. Many newcomers to the field are not experienced in the basic processes to organize their project in an orderly manner. The result is a chaotic, inefficient, and incomplete product. Readers are presented with a step-by-step guide to organizing the process by following professional standards in creating needed and useful documentation for all animators, whether creating in cells, stop-motion, experimental, or computer graphic productions.

Basics Animation: Scriptwriting addresses the full range of approaches to scripting and developing for animated films. It details the issues faced by the animation scriptwriter, and the techniques to overcome them. It also seeks to promote the unique qualities of animation as a form of expression, using many images to illustrate and emphasise points made in the text. This book looks at genres in animation as a starting point for scripting, employing a range of case studies from feature films to public relations work to independent productions, in order to reveal a range of approaches to writing.

Basics Animation 03: Drawing for Animation introduces readers to the practice of drawing images for use in animation. It examines the thinking process and techniques involved with drawing characters, composition and movement, narrative and adaptation. Drawing is a fundamental part of the preparatory stages of virtually all design-led projects. It is the core method by which ideas and concepts are envisaged and ultimately shared with collaborators, clients and audiences. Aimed at students and those interested in entering the animation business, this book explores the pre-production work essential for producing great animation. It gives readers a real insight into this work through its outstanding range of images.