Hi All:

I've been away from iclone for a few months and started yesterday to get back into it. I tend to work in spurts.

I was reading through the forums to catch up on things and a discussion about rendering and an observation by Dr Nemesis struck me. 

" You know what would be a game changer? 5% of the Iclone community making a push to improve their craft. Though I rarely notice threads or posts encouraging such a thing. "

That  applies to me. I have a tendency to mess around with technical stuff rather than concentrate on telling a story. Blender tutorials, new software, etc.

This "spurt" I want to improve my craft, my actual ability to tell a story. .

To that end I would like to ask for any ideas on how to do that. Book recommendations, websites, exercises, good iclone films to watch, bad iclone films to watch. You name it. Anything you think that can help.


Thanks in advance.

Watching movies made before the 2000s would be a big help. Sure there are great cinematographers out there nowadays, but they didn't have to be nearly as ingenius as the old-timers used to be.
Source Material:
Hitchcock
John Ford westerns
John Carpenter
Kubrick
Seems like there is a lot of horror in that list, right? That's because horror directors rely on innuendo and suggestion to build tension!

Idon't know it it is the good english word but Comics ("Bande dessinees" in french) is a good start.
Choose a Short story , 3 or 4 pages and you can use it as a story board.

Hope this helps

Pick a favorite movie. Recreate it shot by shot. When you are done you will be an expert!

There was a pretty good (and long) thread on I started almost a year ago.  

https://forum.reallusion.com/353451/Filmmaking-versus-Animation?PageIndex=1

Perhaps that will at least give you some general (or even more specific) directions.  I still think (and I think I wrote about it there) that an entire sub-forum dedicated to this would be one of the most important and beneficial things RL could add here.

---

Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Maybe we should start a challenge...recreate a shot from a specific movie and see all the results!

There are a lot of free resources but IMO they tend not to be as focused as paid ones. So my recommendations cost money but are good for those who want to excel beyond ok Youtube vids.

For developing your story/script skills. There are tons of books on this. A popular one (although not without it's controversy) is Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder.

A bit more expensive  but maybe more of an all rounder, there's the series of video tutorials, Writng 101/ 201 by Seth Worley.

Hollywood Camera Work: A bit old but all the principles are as sound now as they were when it was made. The delivery is a tad dry but the knowledge is essential. After understanding this you'd know how to communicate effectively through staging and camera work, and also have a better understanding of when/how it's appropriate to break rules. This will also make observing modern cinematography a lot more meaningful from an educational standpoint.
Here's a link to some of the samples they have on Youtube. I believe these might also be available in public libraries depending on where you are.

Try a stort stage play  from Freedrama free stage plays scripts

sjonesdc :hehe:

STILL LEARNING!!!

+1

I have a few other books as well, but "Save the Cat" is definitely on my short list of favorites to recommend.

---

iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I think it is best to start with something short, as that gives you a better chance of actually finishing.

Most screenwriting books are aimed at wanting to be a spec screenwriter for feature films, especially for Hollywood. Which is great if that's your goal. Writing a short form film has it's own challenges: you need to be much more concise, so I find most screenwriting books of limited value. But that's me, obviously.

I always do stories (good or bad). For my first one I took a radio play and animated it. There are a lot of radio plays online and the nice thing is that you already have the dialog.

For quite some time we had the Pinhead competitions. A situation is described and you have to make a short movie about what happens next. So that is another approach to getting a story.

I sometimes set a technical goal for a project. For example, for this movie I want to improve lighting or camera work.

---