Book excerpt: Featuring hundreds of carefully hand-crafted illustrations by the internationally renowned production designer Hans Bacher, Sketchbook - Composition Studies for Film is a unique journey through the mind and creative process of one of the artistic legends in animation film design. Having shaped such films as The Lion King, Mulan and Beauty and the Beast to name a few, Hans's work is a part of the very cultural fabric of our age. Here the artist puts on display the rarely discussed first part of image making for film, the conceptual thumbnail. Exquisitely beautiful in themselves, these small illustrations represent the birth of what eventually becomes the iconic images we experience on the silver screen. Essential to anyone interested in understanding the skeletal structure that exists underneath stunning imagery in all forms of media, this book is especially relevant today with the dramatic increase of interest in film and game design. Although students today have ready access to and an understanding of technical aspects of the craft using associated software, the area most lacking in accessible information is this quintessential first part of thumb-nailing an image. This unique book will provide the student and professional with the fundamentals of conceptualizing images, and how these can be used in composition in the related fields of illustration, graphic novels, 2D animation, 3D animation, photography and cinematography.