Foreword to This Edition
Face it, Bart, Sideshow Bob has changed. No, he hasn’t. He’s more the same than ever!
—Lisa and Bart Simpson in “Brother from Another Series,” The Simpsons, Season 8
The first edition of this book was published in 2005 and I wrote the foreword for the third edition in 2008. I just read it, with an eye to updating it. I didn’t change a word.
Everything I wrote then is even more true today. I’m seeing it every time I turn on my television—people are losing their preoccupation with realism and just telling stories. Certainly in many cases this is due to drastically reduced budgets. Nothing inspires creativity like limited resources. But if you can make your point as effectively with a stylized-but-beautiful animation, suddenly spending months of work to “do it photo-real” seems like more than just squandered resources; it seems to miss the point altogether.
Now we’re shooting sumptuous moving images on inexpensive DSLR cameras. Laptop computers are every bit as powerful as tower workstations from two years ago. Our phones have HD video cameras and our favorite visual effects application comes bundled with a competent roto artist in the box. We’re expected to make even more for even less.
The combination of Adobe After Effects CS5 and this book remains your best asset in that battle. What I wrote in 2008’s foreword was controversial and challenging at the time, but today it just feels like common sense. When the season finale of a hit TV show is shot using a camera that you can buy at the corner camera store—when a professional cinematographer is willing to suffer through compression artifacts and other technical shortcomings of that camera because the images he makes with it create an emotional experience he can’t achieve any other way—you’re in the middle of a sea change. It’s not the 100-artist facilities or the shops with investments in “big iron” that are going to come out on top. The victory will go to the artists who generate an emotional reaction by any means necessary. The filmmaker with an entire studio in her backpack. The visual effects artist who has an entire show’s worth of shots slap-comped while the editor is still loading footage. The graphic designer who ignores the stale collection of stock footage and shoots his own cloud time-lapse using a $.99 iPhone app.
Two years ago it was fun to think about bringing the sex to your work. Today it’s necessary for survival. Use what you learn in this book to make beautiful things that challenge and excite people. The tools have gotten better. It’s up to you to translate that into a better audience experience.
Stu Maschwitz
San Francisco, August 2010