Thank you all for being so kind about my post. Post’…it was practically a novel. I hope it was helpful for those unsure where to start? Thanks Benjamin Tuttle for getting and promoting my last point, and thank you Kelleytoons for starting this post, it has obviously struck a nerve?
There are no sure things about storytelling; and despite how people have tried, no formula that lasts for terribly long, because of its very nature. Duh!
The ancient Greeks had a system for drama that much of Western storytelling has followed; number of acts etc, etc. But even in the ‘Orient’ (and I don’t mean that term pejoratively, but as a means of differentiating cultural bias,) there are systems and structures that underlie all successful tales, and yet would leave most Westerners totally confused…
People have been jailed for storytelling, a few even killed, (and I’m talking pure fiction here?) Yet despite all this, many, many fine novels and motion pictures simply fail to find an audience. Sometimes it is because the story is too confronting…too soon…as modern lingo would have it.Sometimes it’s just a lousy story, but mostly it’s just a story ‘badly told’…
We are lucky to live in an era of endless ‘remakes’and ‘re-boots’…watch them all! (I don’t mean enjoy them necessarily, most are execrable.) I recently watched the two hour re-make of Alfred Hitchcocks ‘Rebecca’…in my humble opinion one of the great movies of all time…and my soul nearly departed my body!
Immediately afterwards I watched the original. I saw where Hitchcock had ‘cut to the chase’, created and deleted dialogue to improve character and pacing. In short, watching a two hour modern re-make gave me a chance to get a lesson in film making from Alfred Hitchcock himself, even though he’s been dead for 38 years?..
It has been said many times, that great writers, are great readers, and I have always found it so. Great film makers are generally great cineaste’s. Martin Scorcese, George Lucas, Steven Speilberg and Francis Ford Coppola all come immediately to mind. Without their efforts all of the later films of Akira Kurosawa would never have come to pass, and Abel Gance’s 4hour silent film of ‘Napoleon’ would have rotted away beyond saving.
What has this to do with IClone’ I hear you ask? Everything!..
Since the very first art gallery came into being,(most in the early days owned by only the very rich and powerful,) artists from all over would go to examine and criticise each others work. There was a certain amount of ego involved as each artist tried to outdo the other…not unlike a lot of Hollywood today?
Those artists knew, if they were stuck painting, say‘a full moon’, someone, somewhere would’ve figured out how to pull it off, all they needed was to see what had been done and figure out a way to do it better.
We ICloner’s are so lucky, Cinema is just over a hundred years old. There’s a lot of film out there folks! Just in terms of ‘animation’ we have everything from Disney to Chuck Jones and beyond. (The Warner cartoons or even ‘Tom and Jerry’ aren’t much longer than most IClone offerings?) Got an ‘animation’ problem? Someone, somewhere has figured it out…all you have to do is find it…
So, watch more, animate more…how to have a family and a real life while doing all this, I’ll leave that to somebody else to explain?..
iClone 7.93/8.01, 6.0 Pro, 5.5 Pro, 3DXchange Pro, Character Creator 3/4, CrazyTalk Animator 2.5 Pro
Homebuilt computer - Windows10, 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K 3.00 GHz Nvidia RTX 3090 Graphics, 64GB DDR5 RAM, MS-7306 motherboard, 12 terabytes of disk space, 28” monitor and Optoma UJHD65-LV projector. Update