Reading is fundamental

I love books and reading, I admit that they are my downfall. Our house has many bookshelves, even my fishtank stands were designed to double as bookshelves. :)

My most recent purchase is The Complete Animation course by Chris Patmore. This book is more of a highlight of the many different practices for animation that are out there. It is a very simple read and has spurred a few ideas for me to try and think about to better my stills and animations.

One thing I am trying to work into my next animation project is the use of an oversized background, similar to how Disney (and others) used to do it with cel animation. This makes for a cool combination because you get a full "scene" that you can move your camera around in but with no worries of polygon face counts. I just need the right project looking for this style of work.

I was having a conversation with Miker the Biker about setting up a storyline in Architectural animations. I see it far too often that people just consider the software output to be good enough and give little to no thought about the camera angle, speed and what they are trying to show. I am not saying that you need to do full storyboards but you do need to consider why you are doing this animation. Is it being done to fill time and make it look like you have done more than you really have? Often times less is more.

Take for example the recent Mars trip, the animations that were done for this were top notch (check out MER entry). Good camera angles and often times the main character (the rocket ship) was in and out of the shot. That is my point of pushing the architectural stale look of animations further.