Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
82
result(s) for
"Tom Sito"
Sort by:
Moving innovation : a history of computer animation
Computer graphics has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. This is the first full-length history of CG & shows how the idea of MIT graduate student Ivan Sutherland has blossomed into a mulitbillion dollar entertainment industry.
Book
Drawing the Line
Some of the most beloved characters in film and television inhabit two-dimensional worlds that spring from the fertile imaginations of talented animators. The movements, characterizations, and settings in the best animated films are as vivid as any live action film, and sometimes seem more alive than life itself. In this case, Hollywood's marketing slogans are fitting; animated stories are frequently magical, leaving memories of happy endings in young and old alike. However, the fantasy lands animators create bear little resemblance to the conditions under which these artists work. Anonymous animators routinely toiled in dark, cramped working environments for long hours and low pay, especially at the emergence of the art form early in the twentieth century. In Drawing the Line, veteran animator Tom Sito chronicles the efforts of generations of working men and women artists who have struggled to create a stable standard of living that is as secure as the worlds their characters inhabit. The former president of America's largest animation union, Sito offers a unique insider's account of animators' struggles with legendary studio kingpins such as Jack Warner and Walt Disney, and their more recent battles with Michael Eisner and other Hollywood players. Based on numerous archival documents, personal interviews, and his own experiences, Sito's history of animation unions is both carefully analytical and deeply personal. Drawing the Line stands as a vital corrective to this field of Hollywood history and is an important look at the animation industry's past, present, and future. Like most elements of the modern commercial media system, animation is rapidly being changed by the forces of globalization and technological innovation. Yet even as pixels replace pencils and bytes replace paints, the working relationship between employer and employee essentially remains the same. In Drawing the Line, Sito challenges the next wave of animators to heed the lessons of their predecessors by organizing and acting collectively to fight against the enormous pressures of the marketplace for their class interests -- and for the betterment of their art form.
eBook
Moving Innovation
Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz Lightyear, between ping pong and PONG. It began in 1963 when an MIT graduate student named Ivan Sutherland created the first true computer animation program. Instead of presenting a series of numbers, Sutherland's Sketchpad program drew lines that created recognizable images. Sutherland noted: \"Since motion can be put into Sketchpad drawings, it might be exciting to try making cartoons.\" This book, the first full-length history of CG, shows us how Sutherland's seemingly offhand idea grew into a multibillion dollar industry. In Moving Innovation, Tom Sito -- himself an animator and industry insider for more than thirty years -- describes the evolution of CG. The history of traditional cinema technology is a fairly straight path from Lumière to MGM. Writing the history of CG, Sito maps simultaneous accomplishments in multiple locales -- academia, the military-industrial complex, movie special effects, video games, experimental film, corporate research, and commercial animation. His story features a memorable cast of characters -- math nerds, avant-garde artists, cold warriors, hippies, video game enthusiasts, and studio executives: disparate types united by a common vision. Computer animation did not begin just with Pixar; Sito shows us how fifty years of work by this motley crew made movies like Toy Story and Avatar possible.
eBook
On Animation: The Director's Perspective
Be a fly on the wall as industry leaders Bill Kroyer and Tom Sito take us through insightful face-to-face interviews, revealing, in these two volumes, the journeys of 23 world-class directors as they candidly share their experiences and personal views on the process of making feature animated films. The interviews were produced and edited by Ron Diamond.Your job is not to be the one with the answers. You should be the one that gets the answers. That's your job. You need to make friends and get to know your crew. These folks are your talent, your bag of tricks. And that's where you're going to find answers to the big problems - Andrew StantonIt's hard. Yet the pain you go through to get what you need for your film enriches you, and it enriches the film. - Brenda ChapmanFrank and Ollie always used to say that great character animation contains movement that is generated by the character's thought process. It can't be plain movement. - John LasseterThe beauty of clay is that it doesn't have to be too polished, or too smooth and sophisticated. You don't want it to be mechanical and lifeless. - Nick ParkThe good thing about animation is that tape is very cheap. Let the actor try things. This is where animation gets to play with spontaneity. You want to capture that line as it has never been said before. And, most likely, if you asked the actor to do it again, he or she just can't repeat that exact performance. But you got it. - Ron Clements
eBook
Bob Abel, Whitney-Demos, and the Eighties
Generally speaking, when people think of the beginnings of CG, they think of the 1980s. It was the decade when CG emerged from the lab and went retail. When the 1980s began there were one or two boutique studios doing CG exclusively. But by 1990 the great media centers of the world were peppered with small digital houses providing effects for film and TV: Metrolight, Centropolis, Xaos, Lamb and Associates, Bo Gehring Aviation, deGraf/Wahrman, R. Greenberg, and many more. It was like the Old West, a digital boomtown populated with geniuses, hucksters, artists, craftsmen, and card sharks, all hawking pixilated
Book Chapter
Spook Work
At times the patronage of a government is as vital to the creation of new technology as the vision of a solitary genius. It seems strangely incongruous that the story of how cartoons or widescreen movie fantasies are made can have anything in common with the technology of war. Yet despite a hagiography of counterculture and social freedom, CG is as much a result of government funding as scratch-resistant lenses or Mylar.
The conflicts of the twentieth century—the world wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 and the Cold War of 1945–1991—were wars of technological attrition fought
Book Chapter
The Cartoon Animation Industry
Burbank, late summer, 1983. “Ron will see you now.” The sandy-haired young man shuffled into the office of the president of the Walt Disney Company. Ever since Walt Disney started the practice, it had been company policy to use first names only. So it was not Mr. Miller, or Pres. Ronald Miller, it had to be simply Ron.¹
As the young man walked through the office, the length of a small bowling alley, he glanced up at the walls, festooned with reminders of the rich legacy left by the Disney artists of the golden age of Hollywood. Framed animation drawings
Book Chapter