Marcia Kuperberg
Marcia was born in Sydney, Australia, where she studied fine art while working as a Typographic Designer in two large advertising agencies, before arriving, wide-eyed, in London in the swinging 60s.
Wanting to make a record of her tours, she commandeered her (then) boyfriend Louis’ 8 mm camera and became hooked on making ‘movies’, graduating to Super 8 with intricate home editing and recording kit, and later onto 16 mm.
This led to a desire to learn movie making professionally, so in the mid-1970s she spent two happy years at the London International Film School, one year making live action 16 mm and 35 mm films and another studying animation and creating 35 mm traditional hand-drawn animation films. Several of her short films have won prizes in international film festivals and have been shown on TV.
She worked as a designer and Art Director for Avon during the 1980s before changing gear again and moving into education.
While teaching design, animation and computer graphics at West Herts College, she also found time to be a student again and gained a teaching qualification (CertEd) and a higher degree (MPhil), working under the late, great Professor John Lansdown at Middlesex University, the latter degree involving research into the merging of video and computer graphics techniques.
Who is this book for?
If you are mad keen to learn animation and want to know how to practise your art across a range of digital media including computer games, this book is for you.
If you have experience of traditional animation and want to know more about applying your skills in the digital arena, this book is very much for you.
If you have an interest or background in art and design and want an introduction to animation that will be useful to you in today’s digital world, you’ve picked the right book.
If animation is your hobby and you need to broaden your perspectives and your skills beyond your particular software, you, too, will gain lots from this book.
But in fact, strangely, this book was written with other students in mind, who don’t necessarily want to be specialist animators as such, for example, those I teach here at West Herts College who are on media production courses ranging from ‘vocational A levels’ (AVCEs), through to undergraduate students (those on BA Honours degrees or Higher National Diploma courses) right through to those post graduate students who are in their mid-twenties to early thirties who perhaps originally studied fine art or design, or media studies with little hands work and who now want a better understanding of production, especially in digital media.
These students – maybe you are one of them – are from different backgrounds and are at different levels in the educational sector but they all have one thing in common: they need to understand the thinking, visualizing and the processes of creating digital images that move.
Teaching computer graphics and animation on such media production courses where ‘animation’ or ‘multimedia’ is one subject or element, has shown me that you cannot learn ‘animation’ – digital or otherwise – in isolation from other media production techniques such as video production. For animators to achieve their full potential they need all the visualizing skills and understanding of a film director.
The book therefore includes information on writing a synopsis, treatment, script and storyboard, and on characterization and conveying narrative. It’s a book covering a very broad area and hopefully you’ll find much in it of interest and reference in your explorations into this field.