No. 30, Problem Five: Bringing the Fox Down (Part 2)

Approving the Timing

Soon I was back with most of the drawings roughed in, and the Director and I looked at this second pencil test.

Scene 13_2

"Oh, this is coming along!" the Director says.  "The timing is looking pretty good."

I felt good about it now.  The timing did look good, I thought.  Still, I yearned to see the smoothness that I knew it would have with all the inbetweens there.  I went back and added them in, then shot another test.

Scene 13_3

At this, the Director only shrugged.  "No surprises here," he said.  "Yeah, it looks nice and smooth, but I knew that it would."



[I want to add a note here to explain how a pencil test for timing can be shot without all planned drawings present.  Suppose you have a section showing the first 9 drawings, with 1 and 9 being the extremes, as in the spacing chart below. 

Spacing chart for drawings 1 through 9

 In the pose-to-pose mode, you would have done those first, of course.   Then the breakdown, number 4.  Then the major inbetweens, 3 and 5.  That leaves drawings 2, 6, 7 and 8 undone.  To shoot a test without these, you have to compensate for the frames of the missing drawings.  So if all these movement drawings, 2 through 8, are meant to be exposed for 2 frames each, then you would expose drawing 3 for four frames, addiing in the frames that will belong later to drawing 2.  On the other end, you expose drawing 5 to include the frames for 6, 7 and 8 as well, or 8 frames.  Thus, whether or not you shoot just 5 drawings or all 9, the total will add up to 18 frames or exposures, and so the overall timing effect will not differ.

Note: Frames for drawing 2 were added to drawing 3, the succeeding drawing, while frames for drawings 6, 7 and 8 were added to drawing 5, the previous drawing.  This is because we don't want to add either amount of frames to the extremes, 1 and 9.  The reason for that is that you want to be able to clearly judge the impact of the extreme pose as planned, and the inadvertent addition of 2 to 6 frames could affect that judgment.]


Now back to our conversation between me, the Animator, and me, the Director...

I thought about it a minute and then I knew what he meant: adding a few missing inbetweens did not change the essential timing, which has to do with how long a pose or action is stressed, or how slow or fast something happens.  All that information had been available in the first test (Sc 13_2).  Adding all the inbetweens was only finessing what already had been stated.

Now the Director said, "You know what I want to see next, don't you?"

"The fox, I guess."

"That's right.  So far, the fox looks like a stuffed toy.  And that's fine, because the man's action here is the important thing, and you had to get that right.  But now I want to see you turn your attention to the fox and make him as alive as the man."


Next: Animating the Fox