moar reading quotes for procrastinate?
The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
pg.56
You make the drawings that will stage each idea in the strongest and the simplest way before going on to the next action.
pg.56
Constant redrawing, planning, and experimentation were required to make the action look natural and realistic while keeping a clear silhouette image. We had to find a pose that read with both definition and appeal.
pg.65
.. he believed in going to the heart of anything and developing the essence of what he found.
- on Walt Disney
pg.67
does your drawing have weight, depth, and balance?
pg.68
Appeal: anything that a person likes to see, a quality of charm, pleasing design, simplicity, communication, and magnetism.
The ugly and repulsive: A weak drawing is complicated or hard to read, has poor design, clumsy shapes, awkward moves, all are low on appeal.
pg.69
We had to find other ways of putting over the points in the scenes, and in so doing developed character animation into a communicative art that astounded the world. But at the time there was neither glory nor pride in our efforts, only the nagging limitations.
pg.69
The constant battle is to find the elements that will look best in this medium and still allow the strongest communication of the idea.
pg.69
Attempting too much refinement can make the drawing so restrained or involved that no communication is possible.
some page around 70
- no twins in drawings (i.e. too much bilateral symmetry kills the drawing)
- the search for an 'animatable shape': had volume but was still flexible, possessed strength without rigidity, gave opportunities for movement that put over our ideas
- a living form, ready to move
pg. 111-112
Our first job is to tell a story that isn't known to the audience. Then we have to tell a story that may cover several days, or several years, in a little over an hour; so consequently we have to tell things faster than they happen in life. Also we want to make things more interesting than ordinary life. Our actors are more rehearsed than everyday people; if somebody gets on a horse or opens a door or sits in a chair, we want to do it as simply and professionally as possible.
Our actors must be more interesting and more unusual than you and I. Their thought processes must be quicker than ours, their uninteresting progressions from one situation to another must be skipped.
-Ham Luske
pg.112
Great fiction is art and invention, not duplicated reality.
pg.115
As the French say, "The more things change, the more things stay the same."
pg.115
If you are going to show something, be sure you don't do it halfway!
pg.119
We seem to know when to 'tap the heart'. Others have hit the intellect. We can hit them in an emotional way. Those who appeal to the intellect only appeal to a very limited group.
- Walt Disney
pg.136
If you can take a piece of business that is dry and uninteresting and if you can animate it so that it will be alive and vital, then as an animator, I think you have fulfilled your duty.
pg.139
It is too limiting to copy someone else.. But it is not out of reach for those who feel as deeply as Bill (Tytla) did, to do something equally great in their own way.
some page after 193
Components of good animation:
- inner feelings and emotion
- acting with clear and definite action
- character and personality
- thought process through expression changes
- ability to analyze
- clear staging
- good composition
- timing
- solidity in drawing
- strength in movement
- imagination
A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway
pg.87
"He's a nut", said Edgar Saunders. "All he knows how to say is 'throw benches'."
pg.93
We are all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.
pg.108
I don't know how a room like this would be for waking up in the morning.
pg.109
My head felt very clear and cold and I wanted to talk facts.
pg.118
I will wait till I see the Anglo-Saxon brushing away harlotry with a toothbrush.
pg.119
All my life I encounter sacred subjects. But very few with you. I suppose you must have them too.
pg.120
Already I am only happy when I am working.
pg.125
It is in defeat that we become Christian.
pg.120
We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.
pg.126
That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.
pg.178
I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
pg.160
..as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.
pg.165
Good Samaritan Study:
..the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behaviour.
pg.223
human decisions are subtle and complicated and not very well understood.
pg.250
The Nurture Assumption:
When we observe a woman who seems hostile and fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve usually makes us choose between these two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of the other, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a facade of passivity - or perhaps she is a warm, passive-dependent woman with a surface defense of aggressiveness.
But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it is possible for the lady to be a hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, warm, castrating person all-in-one. Of course which of these she is at any particular moment would not be random or capricious - it would depend on who she is with, when, how, and much, much, more. But each of these aspects of her self may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.
pg.257
.. there is something in all of us that feels that true answers to problems have to be comprehensive, that there is virtue in the dogged and indiscriminate application of effort, that slow and steady should win the race.
pg.257
The problem, of course, is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible. There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little.
some page after 257
We have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change. We cannot conceive that a piece of paper folded over 50 times could reach the sun. There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categories we can make and the number of people we can truly know.
We throw up our hands at a problem phrased in an abstract way, but have no difficulty at all solving the same problem rephrased as a social dilemma.