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Paul I teach animation and the struggle for many students in both traditional and computer animation is to think cinamatically. Its like silkscreen students who become so focused on screens, inks and masks that they loose sight of the fundamentals of color and composition.There is so much detail in learning the tools in 3ds that overall concepts of lighting, staging, timing which apply to all film/video can be ignored by students who see the leaves, sometimes the trees but not the forest. What I do is require students to develope a basic vocabulary of lighting, composition, camera angle etc (available in film texts ) and use this vocabulary in analizing segments of tv commercials, movies, animation etc. Nightmare before christmas works well because its dense in filmic terms compared to live action stuff. Non animation is good so they realize the commonalities in all film/video. Anyway first I model analysis for them, showing something over and over, then they do in in discussion groups, then they do written ones on their own. Eventually they are analizing their own work and others in the class. This gives them the means to solve problems of clear and exciting communication in their work as well as technical problems. Ive come to the conclusion after 17 years of teaching that techniques and tools are necessary but subordinate to thinking process. Hope this helps Ed