Some of you searching for a book like this are probably students such as myself. I must say that this book is perfect for people who are interested in trying their hand at animation. When I purchased this book, I was enrolled in an animation/games program at my school but I had never really made any animations aside from some spur of the moment flipbooks and stopmotion videos. Despite this, I wanted to make sure that animation was the career for me and I wanted to build up my skills so that I could be ahead of my classmates.
This book was perfect! It taught me the basics of many different techniques and principles that are the foundations for all animation, not just cartoons! Thanks to me spending one summer and a winter break with this book, I not only learned many skills at a more advanced level than most of my classmates, but more importantly, I learned DISCIPLINE. If you watch any review with animators on Youtube or if you have the opportunity to speak to one in person, do not be surprised if the main advice they give you is to have discipline. By using these exercises, I taught myself drawing stamina and the discipline to keep improving on my work.
A word of caution: many animators and reviewers on this site are probably going to advise that any "serious" animators skip over this book and check out Richard Williams' "Animator's Survival Kit". My opinion: start with Preston Blair's book first, then, if you are sure you are serious about animation, check out Williams book. I recently acquired the "Survival Kit" and while it is an excellent resource for animators in all fields, it will most likely intimidate beginners. If I had read Williams' book before Blair's I probably would have been put off by its encyclopedic size and its pages-upon-pages of massive keyframe breakdowns.
I do take points off for some outdatedness. While some information such as the infamous "ball bounce breakdown" in this book is somewhat outdated (Kahl's method is considered the standard nowadays),other methods, such as cel animations and limited animation for tv is even more outdated! You will be hard-pressed to find a studio that still uses cels and traditional film animation cameras. But even these aren't terrible problems since those chapters are educational and show what the industry used to look like not too long ago (this book was first written in the 80s, and I believe that the most recent edition update is from the early 90s).
If you are studying primarily computer animation such as myself, you will probably find that the basic principles are still relevant to CG, but that the absence of a mention of computers to be strange. Considering that Blair passed away in the mid-90s it is probably inevitable that computer animation would not be touched upon.
Despite this, this book is an important first step into the right direction.
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Peter
The book I have been looking for all these years...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 23, 2015
