Animation Ramble - Intuitive Timing
In the last week of classes before the mid year break I gave the first year animation students at Southbank Institute of Technology a spray about taking their knowledge of timing to the next level. An intuative level. . . . . . read on.
4 comments:
I love it how he can just figure out how many frames it's needed for each persons walk. I get what you mean about really knowing about timing and I must say, I'm starting to like these animation work outs.
Though I am seriously hating Virtual dub. I've watched you tutorial on it and everything and i still can't figure it out!
Driving me insane it is
If you have watched the tutorial and still can't get it to work then it must be a problem with my tutorial. We should exchange emails and see if we can get to the bottom of it.
I'm not going to add to the V-dub tangent Dana Banana has sent the comments on. I'll bring it back to the 'timing tuition' theme.
The reward is, you can play goD. You can do anything you like with it. That's a Richard Williams quote from the end of the clip. He's talking about animation and how it is an expensive and time consuming method of representing life. Is he suggesting we are megalomaniacs? I think he is suggesting that we have the ultimate creative freedom.
I notice the sound track is marching music. It helps give a sense of timing to the walks. You can see the standard pace of a walk seems to be at march time.
The gran with the cane was moving, foot placing at about 20 frames per step. I found that interesting as I am animating a 'gran walk'.
In my student animation experiment I found/hoped that it was more humorous to move the gran walk along at twice that speed, that is, taking a step about every 12 seconds. Despite the character being 'old' in her design, she moves along as fast as a younger person. I guess Ian would say "push it", and maybe I should speed up the 'gran scuttle' to one step every 6 frames?
In the EAP I submitted, I moved back to trying to animate the gran moving at a slower, more tentative pace. She was animated on 2s over 50 frames, to take two steps. That is two steps for a mobile person's 4 steps at 'march time'.
I wonder if video referencing some marching would turn out as a foot fall every 10 to 12 frames?
I see that Richard Williams has a metronome beside his light box. I also remember that clip on the ARC blog of Walter Lantz and the animators using a metronome. We don't have a metronome at school in the animation studio, so...
I think hearing a tune in your head would help sort out (intuitive) timing.
I hear the "Bridge over the river Kwai" movie theme. (The theme to the Hogan's Heroes would work just as well; but I think the theme to "MASH" (Suicide is Painless?) moves along a bit slower than a march, so don't get that stuck in your head). And then I get up and march out of the study to get a cuppa in time with the tune in my head, and thinking that the pace is about one step per 12 frames.
virtual dub is awesome. I hope you can get to understand it Dana, as it has lots of cool elements to it
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