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10 of my favourite and useful website

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/

The best well-known and amazing online video streaming site. There is no video you cannot find in YouTube!! YouTube is even more amazing with the High Definition video, so now it is not only quantities, it is also quality of the video.

Wikipedia Encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The best online Encyclopedia. All the knowledge you wish to know is all in this site. It even have high range of languages to choose from, for everyone in the world.

Alones by Aqua Timez

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joyTDZn01-8

Another Music Video from my favourite Japanese band, Alones by Aqua Timez. I love the way they create the animation part by using different people to hold the sketchbook.

新しい世界Atarashii Seika(New World) by Asian Kung fu Generation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYA83Q3cSP4

An Animated Music Video from one of my favourite Japanese band, 新しい世界, Pronounce “atarashii seikai” means New World. They used all the illustration from their previous album’s and Single’s cover to create the story and at the end it shows the cover of their new album.

Software Tutorial site

http://www.tutorialized.com/

A very useful tutorial site for variety of software. They have tutorial from 3ds max, maya, photoshop, Flash, Premeire, Final Cut ….and more. Every times I am stuck when working on 3D model, animation, I will seek solution from this site.

AREA

http://area.autodesk.com/

An official forum of well-known software developer, Autodesk. The forum gather artists all over the world in different industry, sharing their ideas, thoughts, portfolios. The forum also include tutorials of all the Autodesk products. Sometimes even have competitions with incredible prizes.

Fonts

http://www.dafont.com/

This site has tons of fonts in different style available for everyone to download for free. From Gothic, Techno, Fancy, Movies, Games….. all kind of fonts.

Graphical Ideas

http://www.graphic-exchange.com/01graphic.htm

It contains many great graphical ideas of posters, websites, logos…. They inspired some of my thought in my animations.

ANIBOOM

http://www.aniboom.com/

AniBoom is a video streaming site only for animations. They also hold animation award each year, so you might gain your reputation across the world!!

3D World Magazine

http://www.3dworldmag.com/

One of my additional sources of knowledge, 3D World Magazine. Although the site doesn’t have the actually content of the magazine, but it still have the forum for everyone round the world to discuss their works. They also have many competition related to animation for everyone to enter and claim the grand prizes!

Literature reviews:

The Art of Miyazaki’s Spirted Away

“The art of Miyazaki’s Spirted Away” is clearly the art collection book of Miyazaki’s film – Spirited Away, the Japanese famous animator. Firstly, it leads you from an introduction by Miyazaki's, though his concept art (beautiful watercolour sketches) to the final backgrounds and character work including a script at the back. The layout of the book follows the narrative of the film, with introductions to the characters and locations along the way. A section at the back is devoted to the digital processes used during the making of the film and throughout the book there are short paragraphs from the artists about their experiences and thinking process (e.g, use of colour, architectural influence etc). The images in the book are incredible and allow you to study in detail the work and skill of the artists.

As an animation student, I find this book a very useful resource. It allowed me to understand the production progresses of a successful movie, the way of how they make Spirited Away so successful. It also guides me to explore more about animation as art, as well as animation techniques, which really useful for my essay question.

Animating Culture by Eric Smoodin

Animating Culture is written academic investigation of the politics of the Hollywood cartoon around 1930 to 1960. Eric Smoodin uses politics views analyse different genre of animation. Such as the construction of female sexuality in Betty Boop; the place of cartoon shorts in the design of entertainment programs that also included newsreels, live short subjects, and feature films; the use, for a military audience, of cartoon heroes like Private Snafu ``to make any one person's discontent seem anomalous, and to create harmony about U.S. goals during wartime''; the mass media's noncoverage of the 1941 strike at the Disney studio; and the FBI's championing of Walt Disney as an representative for America even as it was investigating him for possible un-American activities. At times, the range of topics gives the book an air of a collection of essays, but its central idea is clear: Cartoons do not simply reflect popular social taste or impose an ideological agreement on their audience but operate within a constantly changing series of social, economic, and political frames. Despite a few comically unexpected descents into academic terminology, Smoodin generally sets out the insights of recent textual and political film theory without sinking into incoherence. Only his chapter on the politics of programming including no relation, between cartoon shorts and the features they introduce. Persuasive support for Smoodin's claim that cartoons offer an unrivaled field to study the shifting fields of force in the entertainment industry.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

“Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” is a very handy tutorial book of ‘teach yourself to be an artist'. It tackles the fundamental reasons why people are not drawing in a right path and teaches you how to overcome the problems in a very clear way. For example, tables normally have four legs of equal length, colour and shape. But drawings which show tables like this are usually unrealistic and confused, because people are drawing from the image of the table deep down from their memory, rather than drawing what you observing. In another word, You need to draw what you “see” and not what you “know”. Inside the book its include lots of practice exercises to alter the way people drawing what they see.

I found "Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain" a great place to start learning to draw - something I thought completely beyond me. How to improve and move to other styles and ways of seeing is a different matter, but now there's a basis and confidence that I will not be completely wasting my time I can hardly wait to investigate further.
If you can take the time, it's well worth the effort.

Drawing Technique & Purpose

by Susan Lambert

“Drawing Technique & Purpose” is a fundamental art book shows both why and how drawings are made. It explain what actually is drawing, demonstrate beyond the central important of drawing to generations of artists and to all visual arts. There are three types discussed in this book: Drawing as a discipline, drawing as imagination and drawing for utility. The Techniques of drawing can be easily being treated, whereas the purposes of it are not always easy to define. Artists and writers on art have stressed the important of drawing, some considering it the most basic skill of both artist and designer. The Term “Drawing” differed in different groups during different periods. It stated “drawing both as a technique to be distinguished from colouring and also as the creative ideas made visible in preliminary sketch”. It also addressed that some of the drawing could be placed under any title, as the drawing is often beeing made not clearly, because a single drawing can have many functions both for artists who made it and for the others. What amazed me of this book is it shows many examples of artworks and analyses their techniques and purposes used in the artworks.

This book helps me understand what is actually “drawing”. In every drawings, the techniques and purposes of the artists used didn’t apply for nothing, there must be a reason behind them.