Customer Rating:  
Summary: [WEAK]
Comment: This book epitomises everything that is bad about Flash animation. Someone who can't draw and can't animate trying to bluff the general public....
Customer Rating:
Summary: Uneven but with some great sections
Comment: I teach Animation at the University level and love parts of this book and hate others.
What's good about it:
Speach,sound and syncing;
Scripting, production details
General introduction to Flash's interface and drawing tools;
Key concepts of cartoon figure drawing;
It's in Black and White, which means you get 430 pages for a $... list price. Color is lovely but too expensive for this level of book.
What it's bad at:
Details on Flash use (You will need another book for that);
Walk cycles, these are crucial and his examples are horrible;
Corny old character types -- these will make your work look generic in the extreme. Kills the imagination.
Overall project planning, he's good on the details but poor on the big picture, especially for beginners with small projects.
Too much space used on specialized tricks -- some are trivial, some are ugly, some are wonderful(like channelling video)but they should be there taking space from a more thorough examination of either Flash fundamentals or basic planning
What doesn't matter:
Fernandez doesn't draw brilliantly. He's good enough to get the point across. Some drawing is so good that it intimidates learners. Most sucessful animation is far more dependant on timing, motion and script than drawing skill.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Comment: I was delightfully surprised that a book about cartoon animation covered so much ground in a single volume as this one does. Being a professional animator myself, and being quite familiar the type of material available out there for independent study, I have found that a book this big usually takes a team of 4 maybe even 5 separate artists to create.I was especially impressed by the amount of detail the author placed on the subject of screenwriting and story construction. I have never seen this done in any other animation book (at least not to this capacity) but it makes perfect sense being that the most important part of any production is in fact, the writing itself. This section alone is like a book within a book. Furthermore this author's unique approach to flash animation is simply beyond the norm. Who'd ever thought that you can use a live video feed in conjunction with Flash? You'd figure a book a bout Flash animation would actually encourage the use of tweens and movie clip symbols; yet, Mr. Fernandez makes states a good case against their usage. In some cases it's as though the author is directly challenging the manufacturer of the software itself with references to poorly named objects unusable procedures. This is not one of those 25 dollar - 80 page "coffee table" books that you buy simply because of the "pretty pictures" and maybe some interviews with prominent members of the industry and yet have no real instructional substance to offer the reader. This book is one of those, required reading, type of books that anyone interested in production oriented animation in Flash (not just beginners) should consider as part of their arsenal.
Customer Rating:
Summary: ...
Comment: Its seems to me that there really are alot of people out there who know nothing about animation, (especially after reading the other reviews this book has received), and unfortunately this book does nothing to help the situation.
As a "professional animator" I found this book totally useless, the drawings especially are total rubbish, there are pages of useless information and even some of the more important topics are covered incorrectly and in way that could only confuse people trying to genuinely learn about flash animation.
Its a shame that a book as bad as this is one of the only resources available to people wanting to learn animation in flash.The fact that this guy promotes himself as a "professional" animator when in reality with his drawing ability he may have been a half-baked inbetweener at best is as outrageous as the idea that anyone could be inspired to produce anything worthwhile out of the information provided in his book.
Dont waste your money or your time, if you learn to draw and animate like Ibis your career will be over before it even begins
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book, what you talking about Willis!
Comment: Ibisfernandez.com was my favorite website of all time. It was the first only one at the time dedicated to actually cartooning and animation with flash. I think this book does a great job at providing a much needed refference on the subject. The only thing that could have made this book better is if it were in color and maybe expand a bit more on working with audio.
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