Story Structure and Development ─ A Guide for Animators, VFX Artists, Game Designers, and Virtual Reality

Artists, developers and production crew are all instrumental in bringing stories to life, but they often do not know the basics of story elements. Created for artists, designers, VFX and VR who have been looking for a resource book on story that is designed for people like themselves and covering the basic concepts of story basics, this book will serve as a key professional resource. This book is intended for visual lerarners, organized to provide access to story concepts for screen media professionals and students.

USTAR Professor Craig Caldwell has been a pioneer in digital media since the beginnings of computer animation in the 1980s to its current advancements in interactivity. He is a co-founder and Arts Director for the #1 ranked interactive games program (Princeton Review, March 2015) Entertainment Arts and Engineering (EAE) at the University of Utah.

Professor Caldwell’s Industry experience includes Walt Disney Feature Animation, Burbank, California (’97-’99 & ‘04’-’05) where he established new production training methodologies for Mulan, Tarzan, Dinosaur, Chicken Little (’05), Meet the Robinsons (’06), Bolt (’08) and Tangled (’09). Not long afterwards he joined Electronic Arts Games, Tiburon Studio (’05-’06) where he incorporated training directly into production using proprietary software and assets for Superman ’06 and Madden ’06. The industry insights gained have been directly integrated into EAE Interactive Games Graduate program today where he serves as Arts Director and an Executive Producer on game development including one of the top student games of 2014 (IGF award) CyberHeist.

Professor Caldwell’s extensive Academic background includes Head of the Griffith Film School at Griffith University, Brisbane (2006- 2009). At Griffith he joined two diverse faculties into a new school and managed it’s rapidly expanding enrollments to become the largest film school in Australia. He established its interactive game program and facilitated an industry partnership with Sega games to create a state of the art Motion Capture Studio. At University of Arizona, he was Chair of the Media Arts Department (2001-2004), Associate Director of the New Media Center, and guided the establishment of the Hanson Film Institute with an $8million endowment. At Northern Arizona University he established its animation program and created the Visualization lab in partnership with the Department of Computer Science.