Resources - Essential LightWave 3D [8] - page 599

Recommended Reading

This section lists topics I have found essen-
tial to getting to where I am in my career.
With some of them, it will be immediately
obvious as to how they relate to LightWave,
animation, or filmmaking. With others, the
connection may not be so obvious.
Art isn't something that can be quanti-
fied and put into a box. Every work of art,
regardless of medium, is something that
encapsulates the entirety of your emotional,
mental, physical, and spiritual existence —
whatever this summation happens to be.
The more you know, the more you experi-
ence, and the more you live and can really
“hold” the experiences you find, the better
artist you will be.

Letters to Strongheart
J. Allen Boone
As an artist , you see , feel , experience life and
the things that impact you in ways that
leave much more permanent impressions
on your spirit than do the travels of “every-
day people.” These things have to if you are
going to be able to take these experiences
and share them with others through your
work. Letters to Strongheart is a collection of
short letters detailing Boone's travels
around the world. In a way I have not the
skill to describe, Boone's experiences and
how he sees them has done more to open my
eyes to things in my own experiences that I
never would have noticed before than
nearly any other topic (non-fiction or other-
wise). I rank this on the same level as The
Artist's Way .

The Artist's Way
Julia Cameron
Top on the list of topics I recommend is this
one. Why? Because if you're like most art-
ists who find themselves pulled to 3D,
you're not just good at one thing — you're
good at a whole lot of things. How do you
know what you really want to focus your
time, energy, and spirit into? This topic is
made up of exercises that seem like play at
first but really help you figure out what you
want to devote your time as an artist
toward. Perhaps even more valuable, it
shows you how to experience the time you
spend creating your art as “playtime”; this is
the one true secret to letting your work
soar to its highest heights more quickly
than anything else.

Film Directing: Shot by Shot
Steven D. Katz
For anyone who is going to be successful in
the art of visual storytelling, you must
understand how to communicate within this
medium. I've seen a few topics come on the
market that are seriously pale shadows of
this topic. This is what you study when you
study filmmaking at the top schools in the
country. (Need I say more? Okay, I will.) To
illustrate its points as to how to tell your
story , it has extensive storyboard sequences
from Citizen Kane , The Birds , Blade Runner ,
The Graduate , and Empire of the Sun .It
clearly shows you all the established filmic
conventions (camera positions, ways of
shooting dialogue, and establishing and
maintaining narrative control) and how to
break them when you need to .