Multimedia Books

Most artists can't do everything - usually they are somewhere in the middle of a chain of production responsiblities that don't include the skillsets involved with presenting a portfolio, digital or otherwise. Many points of insider knowledge are invaluable - I was on the cusp of using PowerPoint for my CD portfolio (my wife has strong skills with this) before being warned that this bussiness presentation software's would be viewed with derision by art directors, and that a high resolution version of a website format is the way to go here - this one parcel of knowledge was worth the price of the book alone, but it is far from the only lesson imparted. Highly recommended - it doesn't stray into realms of esoterica for the sake of pagecount.

This handbook is targeted at beginners in designing portfolios to submit their artwork or photos when job hunting. It is filled with information, however most is very basic and will only be a review for most readers.

If you set can aside the near 100% focus on digital media (though it is excellent for that kind of format) and not hyperventilate in feeling like you need to come up with Flash or DVDs after reading this, it offers solid points on portfolio content, whatever format you choose.

It covers what should go in, what should not go in, how much should go in, how/if to deal with process pieces, storyboarding,
thematic ties to pull a disparate portfolio together, and sage advice on basics like the kinds of written copy you want to include, such as design briefs, problem statements, and tag lines. It's my favorite book for this effort right now. My husband's, too. I have to pry it off his desk.

It's also savvy when it comes to marketing, so I think it will have a long shelf life in my library for the days when I need to market myself on other things besides landing a job, like marketing my firm.

It has some printed web site design examples which offer visual eye inspiration for printed page layout. It even has great image workflow tips, towards preserving the best image quality with the least needed resolution, that are comprehensible to the lay person as well as meaningful to someone with a high degree of digital photographic processing background.

For several months I searched for an appropriate textbook for a course that I was developing. Several days prior to the deadline for the course outline, "Designing a Digital Portfolio " was published. After reading the book, I realized this was the authoritative text for anyone in a creative field. The book asks and answers all the essential questions. It is perfect for the technological savvy multimedia programmer or for any artist with limited technology expertise. I urge anyone who is even considering developing a digital portfolio to buy this book. Without qualification, this is the most valuable book on the market

Multimedia Portfolio Instructor/Art Institute/Art Institute Online
Subject Matter Expert / Curriculum Development Multimedia Portfolio

This is one of the best books on its topic that I have ever seen. From the title, I expected to find advice on preparing images for the screen, how to put them on a CD or DVD, etc. Those things are there, but the book begins in a logical place that I wouldn't have considered. Brown's approach is truly holistic.

Check out page 23 for the first page of a three-page self assessment check list. It has you evaluate your professional strengths and weaknesses, goals and personality.

Chapter 3 asks you a bunch of questions to help you identify who your audience really is and focus on them.

The rest of the book covers various digital formats, how to organize your work, how to get images of 3D and oversized work into your portfolio, including choosing a camera and setting up for shooting.

Ms. Brown covers editing your images to remove the most common problems, such as moire, sharpening needs, bad crops, etc. And ... she devotes a section to creating written content to accompany your stunning images, telling you how to write to that audience you defined earlier.

She explains the differences between a monitor screen and a printed page. You need to know that to design the correct interface for your portfolio. She also has a full chapter devoted to marketing and copyright issues.

The entire book is scattered with quotes (in friendly green type) from experts and those who have gone before you. The quotes tell you what agencies are looking for in a portfolio, how others have found success at this, what things you can do to streamline the process, etc.

The author gave some great historiography infromation concerning various religious sects as to how pastoral care emerges from each group. The book was not to finite with detail, but it was precise and breif enough to encompass a broad perspective. The CD that comes along with the book was just as useful to use as the book itself.

The Dictionary is useful for readers across a wide spectrum, not only for pastoral carers. Contains concise and practical information. The theological import of each entry is spelled out. Each entry has a bibliography for further reading or cross reference. I found myself browsing at leisure!

Anyone who has worked in the area where psychology and religion interface will appreciate this solid, thorough and carefully edited work that is without par in the field. Grounded in the actual experience of the "theology of living documents", the articles are as much practical as theoretical and academic. Thoroughly ecumenical, this massive reference work promotes dialogue between faith and theology and clinical theory and practice. If this is the kind of subject that interests you then you need to own this book.

F.X. Charet Phd

This a comprehensive and well-written reference work with more than 1200 articles and 1346 pages. For the parish minister or pastor who needs guidance, this book should definitely be on the shelf as a mandatory reference work. For seminarians, it might be overwhelming, but would be a wonderful book to own. For more experienced religious leaders, pastoral counselors and pastoral psychotherapists, however, there is much here that can be gotten more easily and in more sophisticated form from smaller, more specialized books on theology and especially aspects of psychology/psychiatry. Still, it is an admirable piece of scholarship and one that most caregivers will want and use. (Non-religious mental health workers could also use it for working more effectively with religious populations.)

The Dictionary is useful for readers across a wide spectrum, not only for pastoral carers. Contains concise and practical information. The theological import of each entry is spelled out. Each entry has a bibliography for further reading or cross reference. I found myself browsing at leisure!

The author has provided the digital image and cinema industry with a serious text on image processing. Although the stated focus is digital cinema, this book can be utilized by anyone interested in the algorithms of digital image processing. The book is aimed primarily at professionals who are already involved in the field, but it could also be easily used as a textbook on the subject. Derivations are kept to a minimum and numerous examples in MATLAB are provided to illustrate the various digital processes as well as their effects. There are two chapters in particular that are often omitted in image processing texts. One is the chapter on human visual perception which emphasizes the importance of often mentioned phenemona such as contrast sensitivity as well as less often mentioned non-linear effects and their perception. The other is the chapter on image compression which is extensive and includes spatial, transform, and wavelet domain algorithms in detail. Most interesting is the section devoted to the use of the human vision model in the compression process. Although computer vision itself is largely omitted from the book, the author did include a discussion of basic edge detection methods.

Chapter 1 introduces the readers to digital processing techniques in a brief fashion. Chapter 2 is a review of two-dimensional discrete signals and systems. If you are rusty on this subject, you will probably need an outside source to help refresh your memory. Chapter 3 describes human visual perception from a system point of view. Human vision plays a key role in the design of image and video compression and display systems, thus the chapter describes vision models in detail, in particular the model that predicts masking effects in digital imaging. Chapters four through six, though interesting, are pretty standard fare for digital image processing texts.

The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is introduced in chapter 7. Without derivations and mathematical proofs, the computation of the DWT using subband coding is described and illustrated with examples. The chapter also explains the connection between wavelets and quadrature mirror filters and shows how to compute a wavelet function from the analysis and synthesis filters with examples. Chapter 8 is devoted to the discussion of image and video compression techniques. This rather extensive chapter describes the basic ideas used in the JPEG2000 and MPEG-2 standards.

Through chapter eight, the processes and algorithms described could be useful to anyone in the field of image processing. In chapter nine the author turns to concerns specific to digital cinema. He does this by addressing some issues behind the special requirements of digital cinema when he discusses two approaches to image compression that meet its requirements - QUALCOMM's system and a system based on the JPEG2000 compression standard. These two systems are interesting because the QUALCOMM system uses the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) as the compression vehicle while the latter uses the DWT for compression. The chapter is rounded out with a discussion of some of the characteristics of digital projectors.

One particular good characteristic of this book is Appendix D, which contains a variety of suggested MATLAB-based projects on the subject of digital image processing. Even if you already have several good texts on the subject of digital image processing, this one is excellent and has a unique contribution for those interested in applying image processing to the interesting field of digital cinema.

This is truly a great book, the math notations are clear and concise. A lot of good reference pointers in the book make it not only a fundamental textbook but also a good research resource. Many sample codes in Matlab are provided. For anyone working on image signal processing, it is a great resource library. The book is equally valuable to professioinals working on this subject and students (senior undergrad or first year graduate students) becoming familiar with the field.
There is only one minor limitation on what it covers on the digital video compression section. Some of the newest techniques used by the H.264 and VC1 were not mentioned here -- such as intra frame prediction, deblocking filter, as well as mathematic coding used in the entropy coding. There is a discussion on the adaptive block based DCT, which is very interesting. Although a comparison with the current adaptive variable size tracking block and Hadamard transformation would be valuable as well.
This might be a good incentive for Dr. Thyagarajan to write a 2nd edition :). In case he plans to write a new edition, maybe he can elaborate a bit more on the last chapter about what were Qualcomm's practical problems in this project and how they were resolved -- I would imagine he could have enough material to expand the last chapter easily to 40-50 pages from 15 pages.
In summary, I like this book a lot, especially the wavelet section. It is one of the best and clearst treatments of the subject I have ever seen.
I highly recommend owning this book and reading it seriously!

I am involved in embedded applications. I currently work with scientific imaging sensors and real-time processing. This book has been useful and straight forward in my line of work. The chapter on human visual perception helped me to relate with camera issues. The book explains in a systematic manner how to apply discrete wavelet transforms to imaging and how to manipulate them. Overall, the materials in the book are easy to understand and have good examples. I highly recommend this book !!!

This book provides a very practical up-to-date introduction and explanation of the concepts and state of the art behind the fast changing world of digital image processing, specifically for higher-end applications such as television and digital cinema. The author does a good job of providing easy-to-understand explanations and examples of the basics of this complicated science that allow a non-technical professional to understand the basics of how digital processing is used in video and image applications. But, he also goes further to explain the complicated mathematical principles of various image processing technologies for the benefit of the serious student. The MATLAB examples in the appendix and the suggested "for further study" exercises help provide tools and direction for readers who want to experiment with the principles in the book. Overall, this book should be very useful to the professional or student trying to understand the current industry thinking regarding digital processing and compression of images for high-end presentation applications like digital cinema at whatever depth of understanding they are needing.

The book "Digital Image Processing with Application to Digital Cinema" is an excellent treatment on digital image processing techniques. Mathematical derivations are kept to a minimum so as not to lose sight of the main principles of image processing. Yet the book can easily serve the needs of both professionals and students equally well. The chapter on human visual perception is treated very well giving all details of known visual models, which are used later in the chapter on image compression. Image enhancement is an essential ingredient in all aspects of image processing and the book aptly covers enhancement techniques in detail with numerous examples. Transform techniques in general and wavelet transform in particular are given adequate coverage that most can follow. The chapter on image compression takes up these transforms and explains clearly how to apply them in achieving quality image and video compression. The book ends with a chapter on case studies involving two state-of-the art systems for distribution of movies in digital format. I enjoyed this book very much and I highly recommend it to all professionals, both in universities and industries.

Great reference guide for video production especially for beginners. Simple easy to read and apply!

I wish I had bought this book initially.
I was pretty new to digital video. I had lots of questions about transferring, capturing analog, audio, and so far this book has answered them. It would have saved time to buy it first.
I'm using the digital video for a vidcast.

If you're new to video editing, it is the one for you. It'S a good start

"3rd Edition" I would recommend this book to anyone interested in becoming a Video Editing Guru. Now there isn't much fame or glory in such a title, and I'm not implying that after reading the book you will be able to instantly break into the "Pro" video editing business either. But it does give you some useful information on how to digitize those video clips and turn them into a respectable home movie or corporate presentation.

The book is very much based on Apple's "iMovie" and Pinnacle's "Studio 8". You'll skip around a bit because of the 2 different programs it explains, but you're really just getting 2 books in one if you ever decide to dabble in the 'other' program. If you're using a video editing program other than these, you may want to pick a different book.

Well organized and "dumb-ed down" enough for the beginner. The projects and included clips on CD Rom keep it interesting. I learned about many tips that I plan to use all the time in my projects now. Good work Underdahl!

Based on what I've seen in this book, I would definitely check out the Adobe Premiere Dummies book by the same author if I decide to move up to that program. I'm confident that I would not be disappointed.

The "Dummies" folks seem to be able to get it right pretty consistently, and they also seem to be willing to update titles with some frequency -- publish a new edition, that means.

When I bought this book, I bought another on the same topic from another publisher and neglected to check the date of publication. Well, it was antique, relatively speaking, so when I picked this one up, suddenly things started to make a lot of sense.

Also, the author seems to be able to cover three editing products without a lot of repetition. This is a good, workmanlike job.

My daughter loves this book. She plays the songs everyday. She now knows all the characters from Sesame Street. The pop ups are great but just a little flimsy.

My [...] son received this book for his birthday and it became a fast favorite. He loves to push the buttons and listen to the music. He also quickly found the "stop" button and likes to stop the music if he doesn't like my singing--then he laughs. This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

My son received this as a first birthday present and still reads it everyday (7 months later!) The pop-ups are all torn, but he loves the music. This is one of his favorite books!

Elmo is everyone's favorite character come alive in this musically interactive book.

My 19 month old daughter LOVES this book! She spends more time with this book than anything else. I wish they would make more books like this. I would definitely recommend this book!!! Not only keeps your child busy but gives mom some quiet time. :)

Leever has definitely arrived with 'Even In Darkness"! I couldn't put it down...if you enjoy suspense-filled novels, this one belongs in your collection!

This is a very intense read. The book grabs you and doesn't let go. I simply wasn't ready for the twist at the end, but whoa! Jay's (the main character's) a guy whose feelings I could really relate to. He's definately a man with "balls."

I really enjoyed this book. The suspense is right up there with the stuff on the bestseller list. I will read anything else this author comes out with.

For the person who doesn't read often (like me), this is the kind of book that keeps you engaged and needing to read on to the next section. The pacing is excellent, and the backdrop of the story--a university campus that takes on more and more of a menacing feeling as the book progresses--is excellently done and unsettling at the same time.

I particularly liked the character of Breeze, and what happens with Kristin near the end of the book. The scenes in the tunnel system underneath the campus with Kristin being pursued in the dark by two bloodthirsty thugs were enough to give one nightmares, but it was great suspense.

Overall, a great read.

Jeffrey Aran Leever is a publications manager for a nonprofit organization in Colorado. An English/writing major from the University of Nebraska (Kearney), he presently lives in Arvada, Colorado. He has co-authored two published non-fiction books.

Colleges often have immense power with the locals of the communities they serve...power which can be turned for dark purposes. When Jay Downing's friend Reed Manley doesn't appear for a preappointed "night on the town," and some strange girl tries to lure Jay into the University's long unused underground tunnels, Jay begins to fear for his friend's life. The police treat Jay as if he is on drugs, and when Reed's body appears outside of town, even the coroner seems to be in on the coverup. But it is the professors at Jay's school in Stratton who act the most bizarre:

"Jay looked again at his professor, and wondered what the man knew. What pieces of the truth he held. It was as if Lanum was trying to hold back something, and yet share it at the same time. As if there'd been something Jay had done that gave Lanum reason for contempt. It had to have been something independent of their never-quite-so-serious interactions in class. But what?"

The idea that a university setting could be used for nefarious purposes, and that professors (who, after all, are supposed to represent the creme de la creme) could be arch-fiends stirs up a shiver of recognition in all of us. (Who hasn't dreamt about not attending class and not knowing where their final was?)

Even In Darkness is a well written, spine-tingling, Gothic, Steven Kingish novel that grips the reader from page one. Leever's use of uncertainty in speech, action, and tone puts the reader into a nervous state from the beginning. It is an excellent tool to produce the results he wants, which is to scare us to death and keep us turning those pages. Even In Darkness is an great first effort in the genre for Leever, and presents him as a new talent to be reckoned with. It is entertaining, scary, infuriating, and deeply satisfying, all at once. A great read.

...

This book is a thriller from start to finish. Word to the wise; don't read this book before you go to bed at night, you may not be able to get to sleep.

This book doesn't contain a lot of jargon. It has pictures of how to do things and explains things in non-technical terms. Great for beginners but also useful as a refresher when you haven't used some aspect for awhile. Well laid out index so easy to find what your looking for. These people have done a good job. Hope they bring out another one more advanced.

I had no idea what the interface looked like or ANY idea about how to use 3DS Max; I just knew I want to learn how to do animations.

Well, I know this book isn't going to have me making 3D animation movies, but it does give a great insight into the program's basics.

Lots of hands-on exercises, just as I like. Lots of pictures too. The authors do an excellent job of spelling out the basics and telling you exactly what you need to do to complete an excerise. And, as you move further along in the book, they "neglect" to tell you how to do something they've already covered - just like a teacher would do in class. It forces you to explore, reread (if you don't understand a subject) and practice with the program - what you need to do if you're ever going to learn to use 3DS Max.

A very well written book about the basics of 3DS Max 7.

I highly recommend this book to the beginning 3ds max student. It was very helpful to me, as it explained more of the basics and gave more detail behind the steps. Also, the tutorials frequently used diffent tools to accomplish the same task. This showed how to use the graphical interface, quad-menus, toolbars, etc.

I found it the best of several books I bought to get my feet wet with 3ds max. It really helped with some of the basic lighting and material concepts. While, this book doesn't even begin to touch all the features of 3ds max, it was a great primer and I'm glad I read it.

This book is perfect for those just getting started in 3ds Max 7. There are a lot of easy to follow screen shots to accompany the text so it is possible to still follow along when you're not in front of your computer. It is written with plenty of step by step explanations of what you are doing and why as well as a great accompanying disk to help with tutorials. It even tackles some of the more difficult aspects of 3d modeling such as composition, the dreaded material editor (it even throws in a side bar about UVW unwrapping) and lighting. It is written with the beginner in mind and does a great job explaining concepts and procedures without insulting your intelligence. It may, however, be a little below intermediate users, it can be a great tool to brush up on fundamentals. I can't recommend this book enough for those looking to get their feet wet in MAX.

The book by Till & O'Connell is great for newcomers simply because it doesn't attempt to give you too much information but only what new users might need to learn the basics of max 7. I had never turned on max 7 and within a week I was amazed as to how much I had learned without having any previous experience with 3d softwares. This should be the first book you buy if you are starting from scratch with max 7.

I've got to hand it to the author, this book did exactly what it said it would do. I needed to learn Premiere fast and now, although I'm no expert, I'm pretty comfortable. I was surprised it was in color too, especially since it was less than $15.

The Focal Easy Guide to Premiere Pro by Tim Kolb is just that - easy. As a longtime Premiere (and now Premiere Pro) user, I found it very easy (there's that word again) to search through the book and find references to tools or procedures that needed "refreshing" in my mind. Even if you use Premiere Pro everyday, you don't use every tool or technique on every project, so the help file and good reference books like this are essential when deadlines are looming or you are just experimenting with new ways to jazz up your videos. The descriptions are easier to follow and are better organized than the online help included with the program. They often go well beyond the information that Adobe includes in the help files.

Aiding me in my searches (and for new users, making Premiere Pro easier to understand) are the book's graphics. The graphics used for the screenshots in this book are, in a word, spectacular. They are crisp, clear and large enough so that even a casual viewing conveys lots of information immediately. They are what sets this book apart from so many other "getting started" books.

I really wish that I had had this book available when I was first learning Premiere; it would have saved me lots of time and lots of bumps from banging my head against the wall.

Jeff Bellune
Owner
Bellune Digital Video Services

A great find! This little book helped me get up to speed with Premiere Pro quickly. It is not a watered down "for dummies" book, but is not an 800-page bible either (which I don't need!!). Instead it gets right down to business and shows you how to get through your first couple projects with ease. The full color, price and ease of use make this a great package.

This book is certainly a great way to get your chops, being taught by someone who uses the application for real world work - on a daily basis.

I've followed Tim around the web for years, on different forums and as a respected expert editor and Adobe guru. You can find him online and pick from his reviews, articles and posts that all clearly demonstrate his qualifications and insights before you buy the book... But no need, it's cheap! Very easy to get way more than 15.00 of value from this book. You really can't go wrong.

It's far better than trudging through a boring black and white book (typical software manual) that covers everything but what you really want to know! The book is laid out very well, lots of color. It offers a very visual method of learning the app and why the different parts of the app are there..what they do.

I've used Premiere for 4 or 5 years now. Premiere Pro is quite different. This book is a great primer and companion for learning the ins and outs of this newly revamped Non-Linear Editor.

I am really of two minds about this book. My impression is that it would be almost useless to teach someone how to use Premiere Pro. I still liked it.

I am no great video editor but I do have some, small familiarity and have learned some things from other books. Based on that experience, I doubt this book would have done much good at all in learning to operate the program. Where I found it useful is in its overview and presentation. It does a great job of explaining broad concepts and giving a feel for the capabilities of the program. It also give some of the very basics of the mechanics of how to edit. I suspect I will find this book useful as a continuing reference not to explain the particulars of how to do something but to explain conceptually what can be done. I will use it as a jumping off point to investigate specific topics in other books.

The illustrations in this volume are luxurious. They are full color screen shots and are big enough, barely, to see what is happening on the screen. How I wish other training aids had as nice visuals!

I like this book so much, I've purchased it 3 times! (My first copy was "borrowed" by one of my designer/producers, my second copy was left at Ubisoft SF, and this is my 3rd copy for myself.)

Great mixture of theories, old-school practices, and new-school techniques.

Although I personally disagree with some parts of what this book teaches, it this game design book is one of the most comprehensive I've seen. Well-recommended.

This might be a good book for teachers looking for material in their classes gamedesign or gamedevelopment. It may also be a good book for selfstudy, if you have the discipline to do the exercises. You need to have played a lot of the classic videogames though, otherwise you might not be able to do the exercises, which are mostly about thinking about gamedesigns and making little designs or design alterations on existing games.

Few people realize just how big a business digital gaming has become. Think of it this way: It's bigger than the domestic box office of the film industry. The amount of time spent playing games by young people now exceeds everything but television in time spent on entertainment. The main factor driving the development of the new extremely powerful computers is gaming, slower machines are capable of handling almost all office tasks.

The authors of this book have a great deal of experience in both designing games and teaching how to design games. This has given them an understanding of how beginning designers grasp the structured elements of games, common traps they fall into, and certain developmental exercises that help the student learn to make better games.

Note that this is not a programming manual, nor is it a graphics design manual. It is on game design. What are the characteristics that make a game, how can you prototype and play test the game without a horrendous programming expense, and finally some input on the game industry and how to decide on how you might like to be employeed in that industry.

I consider this an excellent book on game design. As an amatuer board game and basic computer game designer, I found a lot of the material extremely useful in the *process* of coming up with a game from start to finish.

The chapter on prototyping did a great job in showing how to go ahead and create a prototype from a game idea, while keeping it simple and concentrating on the "core gameplay mechanism."

The chapter on "Playtesting" and "Functionality, Completeness, and Balance" builds on the prototype chapter by emphasizing the iterative nature of design where one go aheads and evaluates, tries new things, identify problems and keep evolving.

The next chapter following is maybe the most important chapter that discusses whether you game is fun, goes in to some theory of what makes a game fun, and relates various techniques of improving player's choices so as to make the game fun.

This is a great book that gives you the necessary tools to go ahead and be able to at the very least create a viable prototype of a game that is possibly fun and playable.

This is BY FAR the best, most concise, easy to understand, easy to follow, fun book on the subject of animation screenwriting. It covers 22, 11, and 7 minute formats and I highly recommend it.

This is a great book for anyone that wants to learn the structure of writing for animated shows. It reveals the formula for creating successful stories, characters, and scripts.

The only drawback was the overuse of the road sign analogies. Don't get me wrong, they work fine to illustrate the points, but I just felt there were too many of them.

In any case, an excellent book if you're starting out your career in animation...like me:)!

Is a shame that a great book like this only have one review until now ( and a wrong one ) hence I'll try to correct this.

NOTE: Be aware that this review is for the GARDNER'S GUIDE TO ANIMATION SCRIPTWRITING ( this review is wrongly appearing TOO in the "Gardner's guide to Multimedia & animation Studios", some kind of problem in Amazon.com I Think, :-( SORRY Chaz )

I bought this book in August 2001, if you are looking for books about scripts there are many ones, some very good, but any is writed exclusively thinking in animation and cartoons. For the animator this is an invaluable reference, here is the summary:

1.- Animation - An Overview
2.- Cartoon Genres
3.- The Moral
4.- Central Idea
5.- Dead End Ahead - The Central question
6.- The Characters and the Character Arc
7.- Introduction to Plot
8.- The Twenty-Two minute Structure
9.- The Eleven Minute Structure
10.- The Seven Minute Structure
11.- Make 'Em Laugh - Levels of Humor
12.- Prose
13.- Dialogue
14.- The Scene
15.- Broadcast Guidelines
16.- The Rewrite
17.- The Writing Process of Animation
Glossary, Cartoonography, Filmography, Road Map Forms, Apendix

The book itself have a good easyreading design, with plenty of quotations and references to well known movies or series, here you have the basics of writing but you can find more profound books about this, the special of the book is that is writed for cartoons specially, have 3 chapters studying the structures of the cartoonscript of 7, 11 and 22 minutes, of course you can apply all the information for an animation of any length, movies or shorts.

Including checklists for Structure, Characters, Scenes, Dialogue, Humor, Prose, 3 Structure guides, 75 Excercises, 37 Rules and an Animated 7 minutes Teleplay in the appendix: You have here a book that will go to occupy an important place near you.

I'm not an acclaimed screenwriter in fact I'm a novice in this area but I'm working with a firm producing some animations and I can asure you that this book can prevent you some rocky mistakes in this special field and even If you are a Pro you'll find some good points here.

I knew that scriptwriting was formulaic, with lots of rules about what should happen at what page and all of the structural details. But this book plots out exactly what a cartoon should do! From the general outline to the set-in-stone types of humor. Who knew that anyone had codified all this stuff! It's all here, from the Flintstones to South Park. This is how it's done.
Far from being confining, I'm finding that reading and re-reading this tome (easy to read tome!) is inspiring beyond belilef. I'm cranking up my DVD player and finding that every detail of every chapter is true down to the last nut and bolt. Professionals have been following these guidelines for decades!
This book must be the textbook for lots of classes about this subject somewhere.
I'm a 3d animator, and it's my goal to make animated shorts a lot more "arty" than Pepper Ann and Rugrats. But this book is such an eye-opener! I've never realized that even the cartoons that I've loved for years - Simpsons, South Park, Ren & Stimpy - all of them! They all follow the same rules.
One funny thing about this book: For a writing manual, it has a phenomenal number of typos. What a hoot. The book is incredibly easy to find your way around. The author is simply a master at her craft, and the insights are invaluable for anyone not employed in Callifornia. Yet you can find 1 or 2 typos or grammatical errors per page. I guess they skimped on the editing.
If you're concerned about developing content for your own animations, or aiming at a job scripting for cartoons, or just want to round out your knowledge about scriptwriting in general, this is an awesome book.

Gardner's Guide To Multimedia & Animation Studies is the complete, definitive, "user friendly", industry directory for anyone seeking jobs, connections, and services information and contacts. In addition to indices listed by state or province, and company name, Gardner's Guide To Multimedia & Animation Studies is carefully organized in four parts: East Coast, Central; West Coast; Canada. Within each regional section the companies are alphabetically listed and include the number of employees, areas of specialization; a brief description, address, phone, fax, and website address. Gardner's Guide To Multimedia & Animation Studies is a very practical and highly recommended addition to industry professional and library reference collections.