Evangeline Than

Mark Waid is a comic book writer. You may have seen his name in the credits for the Flash comic books, and also in Kingdom Come, a mini-series about the current stable of Justice League superheroes, set 20 years in the future.

Waid posts regularly to Kung Fu Monkey, a blog about screenwriting, comic books, and any other geekery that the authors (and I) find amusing. His latest post on Kung Fu Monkey, “Waid Wednesdays #18: Don’t Waste My Time”, gives writers valuable advice on how to handle protagonist conflicts, and explains the difference between false suspense and genuine suspense.

Want to make your story stand out from the rest? Read Waid’s post here.

If you haven’t got time to read the whole post, here’s the bottom line:

Bottom line: don’t waste my time by asking questions with obvious answers or posing “suspenseful” choices with only one real option. That’s just marking time. People (and characters) (and situations) are only interesting when they surprise you.

Source: “Waid Wednesdays #18: Don’t Waste My Time” at the Kung Fu Monkey blog, URL: http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/04/waid-wednesdays-18-dont-waste-my-time.html (posted April 8th, 2009).

Oh dear, another book to add to the giant wish list of Animation Books That I Must Have.

I will quote Stanchfield’s Wikipedia blurb here, because it will tell you all you need to know, much better than I could:

Walt Stanchfield (1919-2000) was an American animator.

Stanchfield was born in Los Angeles [1] and began his career in animation in 1937 at the Charles Mintz Studio. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, then worked at the Walter Lantz Studio prior to his lengthy tenure at The Walt Disney Studios. While at Disney, he worked on every full-length animated feature from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) through The Great Mouse Detective (1986).

In the 1970s, Stanchfield focused his efforts on establishing a training program for new animators along with veteran animator and director Eric Larson. Stanchfield held regular weekly drawing classes and lectures for the crew, and among his students were young talent that went on to become prominent figures within the animation industry: Brad Bird, John Lasseter, Don Bluth, Joe Ranft, John Musker, Ron Clements, Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, and Mark Henn, among others.

In the mid-1980s, Stanchfield taught weekly gesture drawing classes for the entire studio. At the end of each class, he grabbed a few drawings that inspired or challenged him, then pasted them up with his typewritten commentary as a handout for everyone in the class. These weekly lecture notes, along with his early writings for the animation training program, are now gathered and published in the two-volume collection entitled Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes which is published by Focal Press and edited by animation producer Don Hahn [2].

Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes, Volume 1: The Walt Stanchfield Lectures can be found here at Amazon.

Sources: Wikipedia article found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Stanchfield on March 29th, 2009. I first read about this book at Cedric Hohnstadt’s blog, URL: http://cedrichohnstadt.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/walt-stanchfields-drawn-to-life/ (posted March 2nd, 2009).