Resource List

Books

• FUMBLING THE FUTURE. How Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer.
  by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander
  This should be compulsory reading for anyone involved with any type of development. Companies make the same mistakes over and over and over and over.......
   
• DIFFERENT GAMES, DIFFERENT RULES. Why Americans and Japanese Misunderstand Each Other.
  by Haru Yamada
  This should be compulsory reading. I have been the only one that knew what was going on between a  group of Japanese and a group of Americans. And neither side would listen to me....
   
• How to Win Friends & Influence People.
  by Dale Carnegie
  This should be compulsory reading too. A little understanding of the human condition can go a long way.... "the desire to be important".... "the way to develop the best in a person is by appreciation and encouragement".
   
• UNDERSTANDING COMICS. The Invisible Art.
  by Scott McCloud
  This is a brilliant book. A book on philosophy and the creative spirit and something anyone can get something out of. It isn't just about comics. And it is done as a comic book that shows off the merits of the medium.
   
• COMICS & SEQUENTIAL ART.
  by Will Eisner
  This is about that form that is called comics and what it really should be about. It shouldn't have just become super hero stuff  in the west.
   
• Film Directing Shot by Shot.
  by Steven d. Latz
  Visualization, Storyboards and Staging.
   
• Storyboards, Motion in Art.
  by Mark Simon
  The business and Art of Storyboarding. Doesn't have the depth of shot by shot, but a working mans coverage of the subject.
   
• SMALLTALK-80. THE LANGUAGE AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION.
  by Adela Goldberg and David Robson
  You don't know anything about software until you have spent a few years with Smalltalk, and done a lot of assembler and  DSP code. There is so much rubbish about unix derived things being the end all and be all of software development, and free source, but they are all so primitive to what Smalltalk had twenty years ago.  Design Patterns, Refactoring, GUIs was all there. Visit www.squeak.org for the current incarnation. Not suitable for commercial application development now, but could have been, in the same way the future got hijacked and we don't have vacations on mars in 2004.
   
• The Cobb Book, COBB AGAIN and COLORVISION
  by Ron Cobb
  Ecology, racism, drugs, disasters, law'n'order, religion and outer space: eight years of cartoons from the underground press. Brilliant political cartoons. Ron Cobb is also one of the Concept Artists.  One of our heroes, along with James A. Moore (digital audio) and Ritchie Blackmore (rock guitarist).
   

  At long last, Ron has gotten on the Web, the Ron Cobb Official Website.

• SYD MEAD'S SENTURY, STUDO image 1, 2 & 3, OBLAGON  and Kronolog
  by Syd Mead
  Syd is one of the great Concept Artists and Industrial Designers. A group in Sydney tried to organize a speaking tour by Syd in 2001, but couldn't get enough interested parties. Most of the Sydney Production Places didn't care. The real killer is,  none in the Industrial Design schools here in Sydney knew who he was...

  It is difficult to recommend any audio related books. The technology has changed from it being very difficult to do with anything you could actually buy,  to just buying a bunch of devices and writing some software, and in many cases,  just writing some software. Hal Chamberlin's Musical Applications of Microprocessors still covers most of what everyone does.
   

Audio Related

• Whise Australia Pty Ltd. PAM is a refined way to model speaker systems, and their powered. subwoofers prove it works. Their US patent No. 6,223,853 explains the process of converting acoustic filters into electrical equivalents and back again.
• Halcro. Australian world leading ultra low distortion audio amplifiers. Backed up with US patent No 6,798,285 5,892,398 and a few others.
• Speaker Workshop. An impressive set of tools to measure driver characteristics, design, and then measure the resulting loudspeakers.
• TrueRTA. A Realtime Spectrum Analyser, and signal generator for audio that is very useful at level 4.

Fairlight Related

• The Holmes Page: The Fairlight CMI is a history and messageboard about the machines and company.
• K.M.I. - the site. A history of various music machines, including the Fairlight CMI.
• DEQX Kim Ryrie's current company. Digital crossover and EQ for loudspeakers. Solving one of the real problems in the audio world.
• Peter Vogel's site. Who gets mentioned is interesting...
  Links to iceTV, his Australian TiVO like Free To Air EPG.

Modeling/Pattern Making/Sculpting Related

• PERFECT TOUCH make a series of tiny sculpting tools that may be interesting to small scale sculptors.
• Masco Design. The Solidworks CAD facility we have used to do tooling for Aluminum production parts.

Special Effects or Animation Related

• VCE Studios The makers of  PYROMANIA I & II CD-ROMs, and other services. Owner Peter Kuran has been involved with a lot of SFX films over the years, since quiting school to work on StarWars.
• Tetsuo Kawamura's DynaFX SFX/3D site Uses miniatures and stop frame animation. The text is only in Japanese, but have a look at his movies and stills. Anime style puppets and Mecha. He will also produce stop frame armatures to your requirements, email him for details.
• Sci-Fi Weekly review of SF2D&I. At the time any thing we published had to be kept completely seperate from what we did for our employer. The stuff looks very dated now. See Desktop Production.

Art or Design Related

• Red World Stories by friends Lewis Morley and Merilyn Pride. Props and Models from their film work, sequential art and illustration.
• Car Styling on the Web in Japanese and English.
• Big Deal's Webworld. Illustrator Dave Deal's website. Humourous Car cartoons and Logos. If you want a logo by the original, this is the guy.

Computer Related

• Perforce. SCM. Free for up to two users, and what we currently commercially use. This or subversion is the way to go.
• Hash Inc. Great 3D character animation software.
• CG Networks. The Australian based site with amazing interviews and images.

Other

• Shigeru Kobayashi Weblog. One guy I worked with for a few years.
• Byte Back Computing. Owned by Greg Aitkin. He was originally involved with PASAC's midi guitar, and is now involved with some projects with me.
• Bendor Research Pty. Ltd. Owned by Zoltan K. He has been involved with some projects with me.
• Shimmery Timbers. Nick Watson's articles and cartoons. Includes the background of, and a comment from, Ron Cobb.
• Paul Graham. Author of Painters & Hackers. Business, art and technology essays.