Here is a walk cycle of Andrew Chesworth's wonderful character Henry.
Andrew set the timing, spacing and tone with his rough animation keys and I proceeded to flesh-out and complete the cycle based on the model sheet and our correspondence. Like the Scarlet Walk Cycle posted previously, the work really grew from Andrew's specific notes! These have also been my first few times animating in Photoshop, which has turned out to be a really great experience!
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Musical Timing 1: Influence on The Barley Way
When making a personal film from beginning to end, for the first time at Sheridan College, the problem of timing and pacing first occurred to me in a practical sense, I wanted to “make them like they used to” but didn't know how to go about doing so. When volunteering at the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive, Director Stephen Worth commented that the timing of many student films feels unplanned because of their methodology. Many students use editing software to time their films by their gut feeling, action-by-action, or in the case of a dialogue heavy film, they time according to the dialogue tracks. As a result of this methodology, the film feels unplanned. Steve then demonstrated how a 1960s Tony the Tiger commercial was timed by explaining the Bar Sheets and Exposure Sheets on which they were timed. Demonstrations such as these, as well as material and tips from Sheridan instructors such as Mark Mayerson who introduced the class to metronomes and recording methods, Bruno Degazio who introduced the class to bar sheets and designed the template, and the blog of Disney historian and animation director Hans Perk inspired me and gave me a direction to further explore the pieces of this puzzle. After exposing myself to such lessons for about 2 years the penny dropped, I reached a functional understanding of the basic principles of beat timing and I used it to time The Barley Way.
The Barley Way Seq1 (first 6 scenes)
The film is timed to the beat from beginning to end. Here is a breakdown of a few simple scenes via the animatic and bar sheets.
The storyboard drawings were timed according to the beats. Fortunatley, the melody accents also strictly adhere to the beat in this segment of Dvorak's "New World Symphony". This helped create the "Mickey Mousing" gag of the "Earth Like" text appearing and disappearing to the melody accents, when writing the bar sheet, I alternated the beats: Beat 1: appear, Beat 2: disappear. Viewers such as Steven Bellettini realized that using Dvorak's "New World Symphony" as the soundtrack for the discovery of an earth-like planet is a Musical pun.
There's various levels of micro-gags in this film. Some people have noticed the "Mickey Mousing" gag, and some have noticed that Beanton's computer screen is manufactured by "Dull".
The manual
The day my penny dropped, I wrote this manual and shared it with two pals. Writing for other people forces you to clarify, since you need to successfully convey the idea to someone who hasn’t heard it before, so writing for others is always a good idea:----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello friends!
My penny dropped, so I wanted to share my 2 cents with you.
It finally clicked in my mind: how to record click tracks, use them to time animatics, and following to write bar-sheets / x-sheets / timing charts.
Click tracks:
Go to Hans Perk's blog and use the metronome-to-beat calculator to figure out your tempo of choice:
http://afilmla.blogspot.com/
Three most used beat tempos for reference:
8 beat= 180
10 beat= 144
12 beat= 120
Recording the click track:
You can easily record a click track by recording a web metronome. http://webmetronome.com/
On a Mac I turn up the volume and record a sound clip in Quicktime.
On a PC, Mark taught us to enable internal recording: go to Windows sound properties > master volume properties >; switch on "recording".
Use Windows sound recorder (accessories > media > sound recorder) to record a minute's worth of each beat. and voila! you have a click track.
Save each track by it's name (8beat, 10 beat etc..) so that it's ready to import to Adobe Premiere.
How to use it in animatics:
Determine the mood and speed of your scene / determine what situation/mood your character is in.
24 beat is depressed
16-14 beat is calm
12 beat is normal pace
10 beat is getting more excited
8 beat is keen or frantic
After determining the mood, import the proper click track to your timeline ( in Premiere ), and line up your storyboard drawings and character poses so that they happen on the beat.
For example: a walk on 12 beats means a step every beat, every 12 frames. (24 frames for both feet)
A character pointing to accent an idea can be 6 frames to anticipate and 6 frames to point etc...
"The Pointer" (http://afilmla.blogspot.com/2006/11/m27-2227-with-click-track_13.html) has some good examples, notice all of Mickey's extreme poses happen on the beat. you can tap your hands to the beat to get a feeling for it, you can also snap your fingers and try walking on a constant 12 beat)
It's way better to do this than to guesstimate your timing based on a sequence of stills (It would almost always be too slow, and doesn't give you a clue on how to write a bar-sheet or x-sheet).
Steve mentioned that an animatic should seem 20% faster than the desired final result. This makes a lot of sense, I remember reading Joe Adamson’s interview with Tex Avery in Tex Avery King of Cartoons, Tex refers to the colored cartoon as a “solid”. The cartoon is much easier/ faster to read when animated and colored. A sequence of stills takes longer to process than animated, colored drawings.
Working to a click track makes it possible to do musical timing before you have any music, you just need to get music that follows the same tempo as planned.
Music allows you to go even faster because of it's engaging / telegraphing nature, a musical beat functions as a heartbeat, the audience feels the beats and expects things to happen on them.
You can reach a shock / surprise when actions happen off the beat, because it plays with the audience's expectations.
Steve's example: "ta-da ta-da ta-dadada....pop! goes the weasel!" If your action happens on the "pop!" it is expected. If your action happens before the pop, it is unexpected.
When the animatic is done, you can move to registering the timing:
The order of writing is as follows: Bar sheets > X-sheets > Timing charts
How it works: A bar is a measure of 4 beats. The first beat is marked by the border-line of the bar, and we indicate the following 3 with drawn-in pencil lines. I chose to divide each bar to 2 beats so I can work in greater detail.
Based on your animatic, count your beats, and number them on your Bar sheet. On the Bar sheet, note/draw the action each beat describes. I placed thumbnails of my storyboard drawings below the beat that describes them in Photoshop, and wrote descriptions of the actions relating to beat numbers.
Working on 24 fps, transcribe the bar sheet information to an X sheet. If your scene is timed on a 9 beat, mark a beat on every 9th line of the X sheet. It's good to number each beat on the bar sheets and X sheets so that you know exactly where you are. You now know exactly how many frames are needed for each action to take place.
You are now ready to write the timing/inbetween charts
You have the number of frames, now you need to determine the spacing (even, slow in/out, favors, overshoots)
Ready? Set, Draw!
-Amir
-----------------------
My further studies of musical timing are explained in "Musical Timing 2: From the Master's Thesis Project"
Musical Timing 2: From the Master's Thesis Project
Continued from Musical Timing 2: Influence on The Barley Way
Although I was happy with the musical timing in my film, I was still unsatisfied, I knew there was more to learn. This lead me to further study timing methods for my Master’s thesis project. Below are three examples from my project, analyzing two 1940s cartoons. Bob Clampett’s Buckaroo Bugs and Dave Fleischer’s Mechanical Monsters.
I started by analyzing the tempo of the clips by tapping my hand to the beat and trying out various click tracks in Adobe Premiere.
After matching the clips with the right tempos, I made graphic note whenever the beats hit. Inspired by Hans Perk, I used Photoshop to make the red beat symbol circles. I cut and pasted them whenever a beat hit (as seen in the soundtrack layer of the screenshot above) and numbered each beat.
Numbering the beats is essential to writing the information on Bar Sheets.
There are many noteworthy elements about the first clip, the strict adherence of most actions to this tempo creates an upbeat uniformity, except with the deliberate intension of surprising gags and action which demand particular attention. The Horse's “eye poke” for example, is placed off the beat (OTB) for surprise. The use of percussion instruments and the punching-bag sound effects further mirror the visuals of the punching gag, which follows the eye poke. All through the clip, the build-up, or anticipation take more time than the executed actions themselves. For example, the horse runs in place leaning backwards in anticipation to shoot off screen for 4 beats (36 frames) to deliver great anticipation, and then shoots off the screen in just 2 frames, also off the beat, for greater surprise. The music of the entire scene is a build-up for the horses' run off the screen, the run off itself is accompanied by the sound effect of a gun shot, to further highlight the visuals.
I would like to thank Milton Grey for his time and contribution in the form of discussions via email.
It was through his detailed notes that I gained greater expertise at writing exposure sheets. Milt's explanation of how arcs are used in Exposure Sheet form also helped me understand how to write better bar sheets. I feel privileged to have had the input of an animator who started his career on Disney's The Jungle Book, interviewed Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett and composer Carl Stalling.
Milt taught me that most WB directors wrote their timing directly on X-sheets
“Clampett and most of the other Warner directors did all of their timing on the animation exposure sheets, being mindful of the beats for a musical tempo, and Carl Stalling would copy the basic information from the ex-sheets onto his bar sheets so that he could begin composing his music to fit the action. The exception was Friz Freleng, who did his timing directly on bar sheets, and then copied his notes from those onto the exposure sheets for the animators”. (Grey 2011)
My research and cartooning process are interrelated, Perhaps with resemblance to Friz Freleng, I prefer starting to work on a bar sheet as it provides a visual timeline. Following feedback from Milt, I became better at writing exposure sheets and can now time on them directly.
Going into this analysis I thought that the animators worked from recorded music tracks, but I realized that both the animation and music are done simultaneously, following instruction from a highly important document: the director's timing. I realized this through discussion with Milt when I asked him about the timing of animation to specific melody:
“I don't think that the other directors, including Friz, generally had any specific melodies in mind. There may have been some exceptions...But Clampett was different in that he was always thinking about the music -- the melodies -- as part of his timing, and on most or all of his cartoons he would take his storyboards into Carl Stalling's room and the two of them would discuss what music, and what melodies, would best suit each scene. There was a lot of give and take in those discussions. Probably Carl would do most of the writing on the bar sheets. So the length of a scene in a Clampett cartoon would more likely be determined by the amount of time necessary for a melody to play, and little actions would be invented to fit the music.” (Grey 2011)
So that, both the music and animation rely on the director's indication of how many bars or frames are assigned for an action to take place.
The backbone to which all their unique efforts were tied, was the timing. Chuck Jones explains in the documentary Tex Avery King of Cartoons:
“It had to be timed by the director on musical Bar Sheets and what we call Exposure Sheets allowing for every 24th of a second of the entire film, before it could go to animation or ink & paint... so we learned the craft which I think was very fortunate, because it taught us the basic rule of all communication, and certainly true of all art forms, that you must work within a discipline...The discipline of filmmaking is and must be timing.” (Needham 1988)
For this clip, as well as the next, I consulted with composer Zvi Avni who helped me further understand the musical elements and identify instruments, Although we share the same last name we are not related.
Here, as in the previous clip, there is also more time given to the anticipation of an action and less to its surprising execution. After dropping Red Hot Rider, Bugs swings in mid-air then runs in place for a total of 4 beats, and shoots out of the frame, off the beat, in only 2 frames.
The entire robbery by magnet scene, 17 beats in total, is an anticipation to Red Hot Rider's pants falling to reveal pink polka dot underpants, the slowest part of the latter action is the “slow-out” to the reveal, the reveal happens off the beat. Pulling someone's pants down may not be a highbrow gag, however the execution shows noteworthy sophistication and layering of various techniques:
1.The music: the use of percussion instruments, such as xylophone and glockenspiel give a metallic sound, mirroring the visuals of the robbery.
2.Inventive animation: such as the wobbling of the belt and the slowing-out of the pants before falling are signs of an intelligent animator using everything he's got to maximize the gag, lesser animators would have just used even inbetweens.
3.Special effects:
Even though there is plenty of anticipation to gags such as the detachment of the Sheriff star from Red Hot Rider's shirt, the animator maximized the potential of the gag by using special effects to further sell “the after effect” of the gag. Knowing that the eye needs a certain amount of frames to adjust to an action, the animator and ink-and-paint assistant used a dry-brush effect in the shape and color of the star close to where it was just a frame ago, it takes several more frames until the dry-brush effect completely dissipates. The dry brush effect is achieved by smearing the leftover paint of a brush on the cel, without wetting it in water to make the paint look smooth.
And all this is done to the musical timing framework, which gives each action calculated and thoughtful placement, resulting in a film with a more precise execution.
The top of the robbery crescendo is Bugs yelling 'Bang!', where these two beats of anticipation, one beat of execution and another beat of reaction illustrate how each element carries out the feeling of frivolous playfulness:
1.The music: the drum-roll accompanies and intensifies the anticipation before the yell, which seamlessly blends to:
2.The dialogue: Bugs yelling 'BANG!', accompanied by:
3.The camera: shaking in unpredictable ways to mirror the yelling action. And all this is done faithfully adhering to the beat.
It is very important to note that in this clip, different tempos reflect the mindsets and mannerisms of different characters. Bugs is on a 9 beat to reflect the slyness of his character and Red Hot Rider is on a 14 beat to reflect the slowness of his character. Although Red Hot Rider also follows the principle of more anticipation and less action, it takes him more time to recover from an action, such as in the slowing out to hold after he has raised his hat.
Nearly all the actions detailed above follow Charlie Chaplin's famous trademark:
1.Show them you're gonna do it 2. Do it 3.Show them that you've done it (Williams 2001).
Or in other words, there are three parts to an action: Anticipation, Action, Reaction. Noteworthy comedians, such as Bob Clampett and his animators, extract the maximum potential of each action part, being mindful of the personality of each individual character.
The changing in the phone booth takes a total of 14 beats, this is the anticipation to the heroic reveal of Superman, which spans over a more modest 5 beats. This follows the same principle seen in Buckaroo Bugs: more time for anticipation, less time for reveal, not only in comedy, but in drama, this gives the statement more 'punch'. The anticipation is created by:
1. The Music: The sequence, or build-up to the fan-fare Superman theme adds tension and anticipation before the reveal.
2. The Camera: Trucks out in a moderate pace, telegraphing to the viewer that it is worthy to gain space for something bombastic to take place.
Zvi noted that When Superman is revealed, only the wind trills are heard to give a short “break” before Superman flies up to the sky, and the entire orchestra resumes playing. Zvi noted that the chords are on the beat throughout the entire piece. Changes in instruments and intensity mirror the visuals, which follow the same beats, both were pre-determined by the director Dave Fleischer, and composer Sammy Timberg. During beat 26 to beat 38, Superman flies upwards to gain greater sight range and look for the Mechanical Monster. Zvi noted that the melody goes chromatically upwards to increase the anticipation, the instruments used reflect the light and confident feel of the character. Beats 39 through 45 follow the Mechanical Monster, which is accompanied by very tense and loud chords, until on beat 46 Superman is revealed and his musical motif returns.
When done with technical precision and artistic vision, musical timing harmonizes all the elements of a film into greater cohesion, and maximizes the delivery of the entertainment experience to the audience. It is a logical and precise method to reach a sensational result. Animation timers can use musical beat timing to control the pacing of the entire film, just as storyboard artists and screenwriters can control story arcs, animation timers can control pacing arcs, deciding on the right pacing for the mood of each sequence and the execution of each action.
I hope people will be inspired to use this information in their own work, let's start a cartoon art movement!
-Amir
Although I was happy with the musical timing in my film, I was still unsatisfied, I knew there was more to learn. This lead me to further study timing methods for my Master’s thesis project. Below are three examples from my project, analyzing two 1940s cartoons. Bob Clampett’s Buckaroo Bugs and Dave Fleischer’s Mechanical Monsters.
How the analysis was made:
After matching the clips with the right tempos, I made graphic note whenever the beats hit. Inspired by Hans Perk, I used Photoshop to make the red beat symbol circles. I cut and pasted them whenever a beat hit (as seen in the soundtrack layer of the screenshot above) and numbered each beat.
Numbering the beats is essential to writing the information on Bar Sheets.
Buckaroo Bugs clip no.1
There are many noteworthy elements about the first clip, the strict adherence of most actions to this tempo creates an upbeat uniformity, except with the deliberate intension of surprising gags and action which demand particular attention. The Horse's “eye poke” for example, is placed off the beat (OTB) for surprise. The use of percussion instruments and the punching-bag sound effects further mirror the visuals of the punching gag, which follows the eye poke. All through the clip, the build-up, or anticipation take more time than the executed actions themselves. For example, the horse runs in place leaning backwards in anticipation to shoot off screen for 4 beats (36 frames) to deliver great anticipation, and then shoots off the screen in just 2 frames, also off the beat, for greater surprise. The music of the entire scene is a build-up for the horses' run off the screen, the run off itself is accompanied by the sound effect of a gun shot, to further highlight the visuals.
I would like to thank Milton Grey for his time and contribution in the form of discussions via email.
It was through his detailed notes that I gained greater expertise at writing exposure sheets. Milt's explanation of how arcs are used in Exposure Sheet form also helped me understand how to write better bar sheets. I feel privileged to have had the input of an animator who started his career on Disney's The Jungle Book, interviewed Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett and composer Carl Stalling.
Milt taught me that most WB directors wrote their timing directly on X-sheets
“Clampett and most of the other Warner directors did all of their timing on the animation exposure sheets, being mindful of the beats for a musical tempo, and Carl Stalling would copy the basic information from the ex-sheets onto his bar sheets so that he could begin composing his music to fit the action. The exception was Friz Freleng, who did his timing directly on bar sheets, and then copied his notes from those onto the exposure sheets for the animators”. (Grey 2011)
My research and cartooning process are interrelated, Perhaps with resemblance to Friz Freleng, I prefer starting to work on a bar sheet as it provides a visual timeline. Following feedback from Milt, I became better at writing exposure sheets and can now time on them directly.
Going into this analysis I thought that the animators worked from recorded music tracks, but I realized that both the animation and music are done simultaneously, following instruction from a highly important document: the director's timing. I realized this through discussion with Milt when I asked him about the timing of animation to specific melody:
“I don't think that the other directors, including Friz, generally had any specific melodies in mind. There may have been some exceptions...But Clampett was different in that he was always thinking about the music -- the melodies -- as part of his timing, and on most or all of his cartoons he would take his storyboards into Carl Stalling's room and the two of them would discuss what music, and what melodies, would best suit each scene. There was a lot of give and take in those discussions. Probably Carl would do most of the writing on the bar sheets. So the length of a scene in a Clampett cartoon would more likely be determined by the amount of time necessary for a melody to play, and little actions would be invented to fit the music.” (Grey 2011)
So that, both the music and animation rely on the director's indication of how many bars or frames are assigned for an action to take place.
The backbone to which all their unique efforts were tied, was the timing. Chuck Jones explains in the documentary Tex Avery King of Cartoons:
“It had to be timed by the director on musical Bar Sheets and what we call Exposure Sheets allowing for every 24th of a second of the entire film, before it could go to animation or ink & paint... so we learned the craft which I think was very fortunate, because it taught us the basic rule of all communication, and certainly true of all art forms, that you must work within a discipline...The discipline of filmmaking is and must be timing.” (Needham 1988)
Buckaroo Bugs clip no.2
For this clip, as well as the next, I consulted with composer Zvi Avni who helped me further understand the musical elements and identify instruments, Although we share the same last name we are not related.
Here, as in the previous clip, there is also more time given to the anticipation of an action and less to its surprising execution. After dropping Red Hot Rider, Bugs swings in mid-air then runs in place for a total of 4 beats, and shoots out of the frame, off the beat, in only 2 frames.
The entire robbery by magnet scene, 17 beats in total, is an anticipation to Red Hot Rider's pants falling to reveal pink polka dot underpants, the slowest part of the latter action is the “slow-out” to the reveal, the reveal happens off the beat. Pulling someone's pants down may not be a highbrow gag, however the execution shows noteworthy sophistication and layering of various techniques:
1.The music: the use of percussion instruments, such as xylophone and glockenspiel give a metallic sound, mirroring the visuals of the robbery.
2.Inventive animation: such as the wobbling of the belt and the slowing-out of the pants before falling are signs of an intelligent animator using everything he's got to maximize the gag, lesser animators would have just used even inbetweens.
3.Special effects:
Even though there is plenty of anticipation to gags such as the detachment of the Sheriff star from Red Hot Rider's shirt, the animator maximized the potential of the gag by using special effects to further sell “the after effect” of the gag. Knowing that the eye needs a certain amount of frames to adjust to an action, the animator and ink-and-paint assistant used a dry-brush effect in the shape and color of the star close to where it was just a frame ago, it takes several more frames until the dry-brush effect completely dissipates. The dry brush effect is achieved by smearing the leftover paint of a brush on the cel, without wetting it in water to make the paint look smooth.
And all this is done to the musical timing framework, which gives each action calculated and thoughtful placement, resulting in a film with a more precise execution.
The top of the robbery crescendo is Bugs yelling 'Bang!', where these two beats of anticipation, one beat of execution and another beat of reaction illustrate how each element carries out the feeling of frivolous playfulness:
1.The music: the drum-roll accompanies and intensifies the anticipation before the yell, which seamlessly blends to:
2.The dialogue: Bugs yelling 'BANG!', accompanied by:
3.The camera: shaking in unpredictable ways to mirror the yelling action. And all this is done faithfully adhering to the beat.
It is very important to note that in this clip, different tempos reflect the mindsets and mannerisms of different characters. Bugs is on a 9 beat to reflect the slyness of his character and Red Hot Rider is on a 14 beat to reflect the slowness of his character. Although Red Hot Rider also follows the principle of more anticipation and less action, it takes him more time to recover from an action, such as in the slowing out to hold after he has raised his hat.
Nearly all the actions detailed above follow Charlie Chaplin's famous trademark:
1.Show them you're gonna do it 2. Do it 3.Show them that you've done it (Williams 2001).
Or in other words, there are three parts to an action: Anticipation, Action, Reaction. Noteworthy comedians, such as Bob Clampett and his animators, extract the maximum potential of each action part, being mindful of the personality of each individual character.
Mechanical Monsters Clip
The changing in the phone booth takes a total of 14 beats, this is the anticipation to the heroic reveal of Superman, which spans over a more modest 5 beats. This follows the same principle seen in Buckaroo Bugs: more time for anticipation, less time for reveal, not only in comedy, but in drama, this gives the statement more 'punch'. The anticipation is created by:
1. The Music: The sequence, or build-up to the fan-fare Superman theme adds tension and anticipation before the reveal.
2. The Camera: Trucks out in a moderate pace, telegraphing to the viewer that it is worthy to gain space for something bombastic to take place.
Zvi noted that When Superman is revealed, only the wind trills are heard to give a short “break” before Superman flies up to the sky, and the entire orchestra resumes playing. Zvi noted that the chords are on the beat throughout the entire piece. Changes in instruments and intensity mirror the visuals, which follow the same beats, both were pre-determined by the director Dave Fleischer, and composer Sammy Timberg. During beat 26 to beat 38, Superman flies upwards to gain greater sight range and look for the Mechanical Monster. Zvi noted that the melody goes chromatically upwards to increase the anticipation, the instruments used reflect the light and confident feel of the character. Beats 39 through 45 follow the Mechanical Monster, which is accompanied by very tense and loud chords, until on beat 46 Superman is revealed and his musical motif returns.
When done with technical precision and artistic vision, musical timing harmonizes all the elements of a film into greater cohesion, and maximizes the delivery of the entertainment experience to the audience. It is a logical and precise method to reach a sensational result. Animation timers can use musical beat timing to control the pacing of the entire film, just as storyboard artists and screenwriters can control story arcs, animation timers can control pacing arcs, deciding on the right pacing for the mood of each sequence and the execution of each action.
I hope people will be inspired to use this information in their own work, let's start a cartoon art movement!
-Amir
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