Book Review: Designing Creatures & Characters by Marc Taro Holmes

Posted on November 13, 2016 by Larry Marshall

From the title of this post you might be wondering if I’ve gone mad. You might be asking “What does Designing Creatures & Characters have to do with being a street sketcher in Quebec City?” Truth is, I bought this book because of the words at the bottom of the cover, Marc Taro Holmes. I’m a big fan. I love his art and because he’s so giving of his time and expertise online, if he’d illustrate the Quebec phone book I’d buy one, and I never call anyone any more.

This book is about how to become a concept artist, working in an animation studio. I know nothing of that world and I figured I’d get this book, flip through it, enjoy the pictures and put it on a shelf. But I found myself reading it, cover-to-cover, gleaning little bits and bobs while learning how character development works in the minds of people with imagination. Wish I had some (grin).

What I have to confess is that I’m not in a position to review this book. It’s beautiful but beyond that, I’m out of my depth. The book is divided into four sections: Ideation, Anatomy, Animation, and Illustration. Each section presents information about its subject and then there are nine projects for the reader to accomplish. It might be to develop a set of fishes inhabiting the sea in a video fishing game or development of a group of possibilities for a warlord character. One project is the development of a crew of a pirate ship.

Each of the major sections builds on its predecessors and eventually you are at a point where you have fully-rendered characters, drawings showing detailed construction information, and drawings showing how the character moves and any special features of said character. It’s all pretty cool.

To be honest, I got the most from the Ideation section. This section is closest to what I do. It’s sketching and in this case, it’s sketching in the form of brainstorming ideas, dumping as many as you can on the page so they can be visualized and evaluated. This was where I surprised myself because I found myself scribbling copies of some of those sketches and I had a ball doing them. I even started adding stuff to those sketches, or removing things. To be sure, I would have been laughed out of any concept director’s office but it was fun nevertheless.

I’m not a fan of digital rendering as it all looks the same to me so when the book ventured further into a concept artist’s process, the book sort of lost me. All I could do was look at the pictures because I have no idea how to digitally render a cube, let alone complex creatures. I wish I could say more about this book but, quoting Clint Eastwood, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” What I can say is that IT’S A MARC TARO HOLMES BOOK and I love it.

What Is Art, Anyway?

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I’ve been fond of saying that “I’m not an artist; I just draw stuff.” Almost as regularly someone tells me that I am an artist and they can’t understand why I say that.

The basis for my comment is more a defense mechanism than anything else. I’ve tired of having so-called ‘art’ people, who can’t draw and don’t feel that artists need be able to do so, try to ‘advise’ me about my sketching. It’s not that I don’t want to learn – I do. I’m constantly reading, listening, learning. By my calculation, in another 20-30 years, I may begin to figure it all out. Until then I’ll just keep trying.

But I’m not interested in people telling me that I need to “loosen up” and “just let go.” I often wonder if Rembrandt, Durer, Homer, etc. were told they needed to “loosen up.”

What I see going on in the art world is, in a word, nonsense. It’s become a world of ‘how weird can you get’ rather than ‘can you create something beautiful.’ The art industry has been great at marketing the idea that if I don’t understand piles of garbage being labelled as art, there’s something wrong with me. And then this video came along and I just HAD to share it.

What Can Antiques Road Show Teach Traditional Publishing?

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Larry Marshall

I was watching the Antiques Road Show last week. I love that show as there are so many stories presented in association with the antiques being discussed. This night there was a guy who had some beautiful, old ledger books. He’d fished them out of a dumpster simply because they were leather-bound, very large, and very cool. Their exteriors suggested they belonged in a medieval monastery. These ledgers were from a company that manufactured buggy parts and dated to the early 1900s. The books were, what’s the word? KEWL!

But as nice as they looked on the outside, it was the inside that held the true gems. Inside were hand-written entries of sales and delivery numbers for the various parts produced by the company. The hand-writing was crisp and clear. John Hancock would have been proud. Sadly, we’ve lost hand-writing as a well-practiced art form.

What was interesting about the entries is that as you flipped through the books you saw that the company had transitioned from making buggy-parts to making car parts. As I watched this I wondered how much grumbling went on within that company over the introduction of cars and the demise of an industry in which they were so heavily invested. I envisioned dart boards with Henry Ford’s face. The bottom line, however, was that not only had the company transitioned from one set of products to another, this company was still in business, throwing out their old ledger books of a century ago. The major book publishers should have been watching Antiques Road Show.

Why? I’m glad you asked.

The book industry is in the middle of same sort of shift that the transportation industry experienced when cars replaced the horse and buggy. It’s moving from a high-cost print-based product to a lower-cost eBook product. On its face this should be easy for publishing companies as only the container for their product (i.e. – words) has changed. In the process they can quickly eliminate many of their printing, distribution and returns costs from the red side of their ledgers.

The problem, however, is that the companies who should be leading this industry change, the big publishing companies, aren’t. In fact, they’re more concerned with protecting their shrinking legacy industry than participating in the newer eBook industry in spite of now reporting that 20-25% of their revenues are coming from eBooks while also reporting large declines in paperback and hardcover sales.

It should be Random House and Macmillan competing to see who has the best eReader, not Barnes & Noble and Amazon. But the large publishers are not only not in the eReader business yet, they are pricing their eBooks in ways that limit sales of their books to consumers who do own eReaders, iPads, iPhones, etc.

Harper-Collins should be inventing innovative ways for libraries to use and distribute eBooks. Instead they have produced a limited lifespan model that is completely unworkable given the modern ways in which libraries interchange books with one another to serve the public.

And so the Internet debate lines have been drawn and we are constantly bombarded by indie vs traditional model blog posts. eBook advocates call traditional publishers names, some becoming justified by the very actions traditional publishers, agents, etc. are taking in attempts to retain their jobs and their way of doing business. Those on the traditional side of the debate are firing back, largely embarrassing themselves as they twist reality into a pretzel as they voice their denial that anything has changed. Much of this denial, I believe, comes from the fact that the large publishers have never viewed readers as their customers and they’re having a hard time coming to grips with that. They’ve always viewed bookstores as their customers.

In the end, however, readers are learning a whole new way to books, without the “big six” being involved. Readers are learning how limited their choices have been, caused largely by the large publishers wanting to make more and more money from the sales of fewer and fewer book titles. Readers are learning more about small publishers than ever before. Independent authors are selling lots of books.

Authors are happy because they are more free to express themselves and because they’re making more money than ever before. They’re able to make their older works available, works that were largely abandoned by the large publishers after a 60-90 day run in bookstores. Readers are happy because the selection is great and generally prices are lower.

And while this is happening the buggy-makers haven’t figured out that they need to start making car parts.

Distorting Free Markets In The Book Industry

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Larry Marshall

Seth Godin has published at least a dozen best-selling books on the post-industrial marketplace, ideas, social media and consulted with many Fortune 500 companies. His insights make following his blog a must for anyone trying to make their way in any marketplace.

Part of his genius is being able to put into a few words, great thoughts. Most of his blog posts are simply great. Occasionally, they are mindbending, not because they are novel but, in fact, because they state clearly something we already know. His latest post, titled The Free Market, is one such post. I encourage you to read it before continuing to read here. It won’t take you long.

The gist of Seth’s point is that:

1) Free markets are great and will generate good results if they are not usurped by those trying to benefit from it.

2) Those trying to benefit will attempt to make the market un-Free in any way that gives them leverage in that market.

3) Without checks and balances against those using their leverage, the free market will suffer and be less free.

We all know that what Seth says is true. But do we talk and act like we do? Look at the debates about the need (or not) of government regulation of business as just one example that suggests we’ve lost sight of this basic logic.

But I’m not here to talk politics. Seth’s post caused me to to think about the book industry. I think that often our discussions about what’s going on in the book industry right now center on the more trivial issues rather than the big ones. For instance,

DRM: is it good or bad?

DRM (digital locks on our eBooks) is touted as a “copyright protection” mechanism. It’s argued that it’s needed to prevent piracy. To counter that there are those who worry about being able to lend their eBooks or to be able to sell them.

Truth is, DRM has little to do with copyright and it certainly isn’t actual copyright protection as this comes from the legal ramifications of copyright law. DRM is, first and foremost, a way for particular hardware manufacturers to control their consumer base – to disrupt of the level playing field if you will. The best evidence for that is the fact that there isn’t a single eBook format or DRM scheme. Each hardware manufacturer has and uses their own. If both industry and consumers would understand this, the debates would change and we’d more often find publishers and consumers on the same side of the debate.

Agency Pricing Model

This is debated, on the one hand, as a way for publishers to retain the perceived value of their product (low price de-value books). Others say that it is counter to traditional manufacturer/retailer models where manufacturers set their selling price and let retailers determine what they’re going to sell the product for. In point of fact, this is how hardcover street prices are determined, with retailers regularly discounting them from their publisher retail price. Why not for eBooks?

The ‘why not’ is best understood from history. The Agency model came about because Apple knew they couldn’t compete with established booksellers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon so they told the publishers, “We’re going to help you out, publishers. Put your higher-priced books in our iBookstore. We’ll let you do this if you’ll to agree to enforce those prices across the industry.” And by doing this, Apple disrupted the free-market pricing model, to its advantage. Random House held out until recently but even they succumbed as they wanted Apple as an outlet for their products.

Conclusion

There are other examples of how various entities in the book industry are attempting to disrupt the free market conditions of the market but there is one unavoidable conclusion. The tail is wagging the dog. Consumers, authors AND publishers are being manipulated by hardware manufacturers. They are trying to create circumstances tha lock consumers into a ‘system’ that favors their sales and limits the abilities of consumers to buy from other vendors. Until publishers and authors insist on open and easily convertable eBooks, they will continue to do so.

Doing Business the Amazon Way

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Larry Marshall

One of the things the Internet has given consumers is a soapbox on which to whine and complain about being wronged by this or that company. It’s a powerful tool. This is a problem for companies, of course, as a 1% error rate (I wish my track record could be that good) can become a steady stream of complaints about its products and/or policies if nothing is done about it.

Conversely, the Internet has provided companies with tools to better serve customers, if they use them. Having Twitter accounts with an action person managing the account, making good support people available via email, and even the use of targeted advertising helps companies keep customers happy.

Sadly, few companies have caught on to the fact that the Internet is doing something that is quite ironic. It is personalizing customer relations. Over the past 100 years or so, we’ve moved from small-town business models where owners knew their customers and vice-versa to a time when large brick-n-mortar stores couldn’t care less about their customers and who hire people who will work cheap but don’t know a thing about the products being sold. They try to paint a different picture in their ads but we all shop. We know the truth. Now, as people debate whether the Internet is destroying our ability to interact directly with humans, the Internet is moving us back to a ‘small town’, knowledgable owner way of doing business. In an earlier post I mentioned one company, Goulet Pens, as an example of this.

It might surprise some who are down on Amazon as being the ‘big brother’ of the book industry, that I like them… very much. In my dealings with them, they very much live up to their email signature line of “We’re Building Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.” Unlike so many online companies, they are responsive and often do things that surprise this cynical consumer.

And so it was this morning when I received an email from Amazon saying they were refunding $14.40 to my account. The email explained that when I’d purchased two Kindle covers (the ones with lights) they’d charged me $7.20 each for “import fee deposit.” I vaguely remembered these charges, both when I bought these covers and when I’d bought my Kindles. I remembered not being very happy about those charges but given that the vagaries and expense of having products shipped across the Canadian/US border, which is akin to moving from west to east in 1960s Germany, I accepted the charges as part of doing business.

The interesting thing is that this transaction took place at the beginning of February! I’d long since forgotten about it. I had to look it up to figure why they were refunding money to me. I had filed no complaint. I never asked for a refund.

But Amazon kept track of it… somehow, and they reimbursed me because, I guess, they didn’t need to use the money to buy off the Canadian government to allow my package to get to me. I really don’t know the details.

What I do know is that this stuff breeds loyalty. These sorts of actions breed consumer confidence. And this sort of consumer-centric thinking is rare in our world. Is it any wonder that Amazon leads the pack and is pulling away? Give consumers what they want, for fair prices and we’ll flock to your stores, be they online or otherwise. Treat us fairly while you’re at it and we’ll be yours for life.

Cheers — Larry