Set the Action!: Creating Backgrounds for Compelling Storytelling in Animation, Comics, and Games

by Elvin A. Hernandez

Create the Gotham for your Batman, the African savannah for your Simba, or the bustling newsroom for your Clark Kent. Background, setting, environment.whatever you call it, it is the silent character in the visual story, and a dynamic and compelling setting can define and hone the action and drama of your story. If you're in the habit of creating disembodied characters or adding backgrounds as an afterthought, Set the Action! will help you understand and utilize the importance of the setting in your narrative. Understand perspective, blocking, and color-and focus your narrative by establishing and designing your setting to interact with characters and story.

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2012

Reviews

[Parka · Rating 4 out of 5]

( More pictures on my blog )

Set the Action is a book on creating backgrounds authored by Elvin A. Hernandez.

It's text heavy with plenty examples and they are well explained. Focus of the book is on it takes to make the environment believable, and hence the story believable. For example, if a character is a dirty fellow, his home should not be spotless clean. There's stuff on what props can be put into the scene, coverage on the different art styles, textures. The perspective section is surprisingly quite brief.

There's not much on talk specifically on animation and games. In particular, games nowadays feature such realistic environments I suppose there would be something to talk about.

This book is more for the intermediate and above artists who already know how to draw characters and just missing information on how to create backgrounds.

I've found some preview pages from Google Books and have embedded them below. Read some pages to get a clearer idea of the book.