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    Cover of Animation from script to screen

    Animation from script to screen

    Shamus Culhane · 1988

    The animator of Popeye and Donald Duck discusses all aspects of film animation and includes over 130 illustrations.

    Arts, Games & Media
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    1recommend
    2mentions
    2people
    2015–2018years
    50% recommend50% neutral

    Mentions per year

    2015201620172018

    What Hacker News says

    1. commienekoOct 2018
      Not exhaustive, or in any particular order:

      _Animator's Survival Kit_, by Richard Williams.

      _Illusion of Life_, by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

      _Animation from Script to Screen_, by Shamus Culhane.

      _Natural Way to Draw_, by Kimon Nicolaïdes.

      _Creative Illustration_, by Andrew Loomis.

      _Timing for Animation_, by Harold Whitaker and John Halas.

      _Drawn to Life_, vols. 1 & 2, by Walt Stanchfield.

      _Character Animation Crash Course!_, by Eric Goldberg.

      _Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation, by Wayne Gilbert.

      _The Noble Approach: Maurice Noble and the Zen of Animation Design_, by Tod Polson.

      _Elemental Magic: The Art of Effects Animation_, vols. 1 & 2, by Joseph Gilland.

      _Story Boarding Essentials_, byDavid Harland Rousseau.

      _Directing the Story_, by Francis Glebas.

      _Animated Storytelling_, by Liz Blazer.

      thread
    2. coldneboMar 2015
      Two things:

      1) The grammar and writing style has some problems with run on sentence fragments. Perhaps this is not the OP's main focus, but learning to code well is similar to learning to write well (in fact there was an article about this posted to HN a few days ago).

      2) By focusing on the idea of 'the best' code, the OP implies some kind of fitness function, but is pretty vague about what that might be. The most obvious fitness function in this context would be that the code works and was written faster than anyone else. Why talk about best-practice and industry standards if your fitness function is speed of writing and correctness?

      Experienced programmers don't talk about the "best" code in general, but rather the best code for a given purpose. Code clarity, speed of execution, elegance, reuse, size in memory... these are all different fitness objectives that have various trade-offs... even saying "yeah, I want ALL of those!" implies trade-offs.

      It's like saying you want a D&D character with all max attributes... it doesn't work that way.

      But there's also a problem with this model of learning. The fastest coders are going to likely be the coders who already know what they are doing, or who work out cheesy ways to game the system. Likely, their incentive for playing will be showing off, not genuinely helping others learn.

      Meanwhile, coders who are learning will always be slower. Yes, they will see a lot of other possible solutions, but without critically understanding the differences between code examples, it all becomes a sea of noise. Stack Overflow is already like this in places -- many answers don't demonstrate an expert analysis of a problem, they simply devolve into: "I tried this", "I reinstalled", "Yeah, it works!", "I'm still having issues".

      Now, if bitlean's 'tail' in the game was a nice social community built around commenting and critiquing code AFTER it was written and judging its fitness for various stated purposes -- then I could see that really building a community of value for learning programming similar to the ways that we learn critical reasoning in writing courses by contributing to critique and discussion.

      'Fast' has its purposes. For example, in Shamus Culhane's book "Animation: from Script to Screen", he talks about the advantages of sketching fast without critical interruption to maintain creative flow. He was adamant about not even erasing one wrong pencil line because it brought critical analysis into the process and disrupted the flow. However, after the sketches capture an idea, that work was always followed by extensive analysis and critique to see where ideas and execution could be improved.

      thread

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