Monday, June 13, 2011

Breaking Down Timing in Animation

Copied frames on top, made up poses on the bottom



Lately I have been drawing some UPA stuff so last night I tried to animate this simple bounce of some guy squashing down and stretching up, and I had a heck of a time with it. Should have been a very simple thing, but took me about 5 hours to do, I will post that later, it's not quite cleaned up yet.

So last night I also did some quick sketches on the arm and lever animation, and today I decided to animate one, it turned out pretty good. I then decided to break down the whole two second loop, just to see how they timed it. I feel like I read about this stuff, but it never really sinks in til I break it down.

The coolest thing that I noticed was when their was smooth action, say from side to side, it wasn't ever a perfect ease in and out. If the animator sprung into a pose, he would ease out slowly, or if he really eased into a pose, he would quickly move to the next one. I feel like this gives the animation a lot of variation, and I guess I have never noticed it until now.

Ultimately, I feel that I just need to do more animation, because I don't feel like I have much of a clue when I try and do it. Even when I try to time out a little scene to see how long everything will take, I still have to keep reworking it and reworking it. Then in the back of my head I keep thinking, how could all of the old masters learn to animate before pencil tests, I'm struggling with instant playback. Anyway, I guess it is safe to say that I am no master of animation.

Lever From - It's Everybody's Business (1956) from Tyler Williams on Vimeo.



Here is that bounce that I was talking about. You can see two of the positions are on the bottom right of the paper at the top. Don't know what UPA short this is from, but they were named Arcadian off of the Cartoon Modern blog, so that is what I am guessing the name is.

UPA Bounce from Tyler Williams on Vimeo.



As you can see, I didn't turn out at all, but it took me so much reworking already that I will let this one be.