THE TIMING CHART - Animation Tutorials - Ep. 105

The timing chart is a traditional technique used to animate without animating. It gets you to think about the timing and spacing of action and can be a real time saver.

We'll talk about this briefly here.

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Closed Caption:

everyone is steve from Mako with another
video tutorial today we're going to
briefly touch the subject of timing
charts now timing chart is a very
classical technique that a lot of
animators use in the early days the
thing about timing chart is that got you
thinking about animating without
actually having to and me
picture yourself as a musician a
classical musician in front of his piano
and an empty sheet of music and what you
would do is you sort of write out your
chord progression your changes and then
you would play your your keys as you saw
fit and and sometimes it works and
sometimes it wouldn't but what you're
ultimately trying to do is save some
time by thinking ahead and by mapping
things out now with animation what you
would do is if you had a stopwatch or
you have a friend or somebody was
videotaping what you would do is use you
try to act out the movement or the
action and try to get a feel for for how
things go
now when you're an actual production
what happens is that your shots or your
scenes have a set time to it and that
sort of an advantage because then you
can use your timing chart to sort of
figure out where drugs are going to go
now in a lot of productions today people
don't use timing charts
it's not so much a lost art so much as
its you're working directly on the
timeline and so for many people there's
almost no need to do it but it's good
practice and it helps you to start
thinking ahead and it might be helpful
if you're doing 3d work or if you're
doing stuff on your own and it's a very
wonderful technique in my opinion and
something that I think will help in the
future so let's get down to how this
actually works so say where we have a
shot and we're shooting at 24 frames a
second and in this shot that's about
half a second long or 12 frames now the
character is going to look screen left
and then he's going to look screen right
and what we would do knowing that this
shot is about half a second or 12 frames
it would do something like this
yeah
so here we have both extremes or both
keys the screen left and the screen
right at the end pose now what we do is
if we were working on the shot is we
need to find out where the breakdown is
so what we do is figure okay well maybe
this shot because the swell frames you
know placing it at frame six right in
the middle is where we can put a passing
position and there we have it now the
advantages of doing things you know
digitally is that you can play it all
back and forth so this is sort of a
rough timing you know here's our first
frame are passing position and our last
key and it feels alright now what you
can do from here is a variety of things
say we want to you know break this down
even further between this key and this
breakdown
now what we could you write off from the
timing chart to say well we I'd like to
ease out over the first key and then
maybe ease into the last key and what we
could do just from the timing chart is
simply replace the positions of our
drawings saying that we like this one to
favor the first key and this breakdown
the favor the last key now some people
you know they start tossing out numbers
right away and saying oh well you know
this will be frame three years will be
framed for but then again it's not an
exact science you have to test out
things and see how they would work in
this instance I've already gone ahead
and play around the timing and what I'm
going to do is say okay well this is
going to be framed for you know because
i'm going to start off on tues and i'm
going to use ones in between to smooth
out the action because it's such a big
change and
and from here so this would be frame 3 4
5 6 7
excuse me and then we go to eight maybe
ten we can do it that way so 4 and eight
would be breakdown drawings and i'll
show you how that works here and see if
we can get something going in between
all that and so for is going to favor
one and so I try to draw a lot closer to
the first position
and then eight would favor the last
position
I will get into arcs of motion in
another episode but for now this is just
to see how all of this would work in a
production setting and she disowned
frame 8 now if we check our timing
you know things seem to pan out quite a
bit and then let's say we want to you
know move things around say that you
know maybe between frame for frame one
we want to add a little bit more time a
little bit more space so we can get more
of that action and we can see the frames
and how they work a lot clearly then
it's just a matter of going back and
changing numbers etc and so if you
really dorky animator and you're working
in this manner once you've plotted out
your keys and and timing is set to your
liking then you can go in and then tell
the in-between well I want you know
frame 10 to go in between frame 1812 or
I'd like frame you know three to go
between 14 or 15 and it's a clear
indication of what they want and you
could do this right at the beginning so
once you start animating you know it
just move very quickly you would have to
think too much
now some people will put on the bottoms
on people put it off to the side it
really doesn't matter it's your
preference for myself the way I've done
it is i tend to work with arcs so i get
to see how my actions going to be you
know from here I can see that you know
he just has going to tilt down just a
little bit and that work out the actions
gay interframe six will be the one of
the breakdowns main breakdowns and four
and then eight etc well I hope you found
this helpful
again it's a very classical technique
many animators back in the early days
would do this a lot and it really takes
a lot of practice to get it right and
and over the years as you continue to
use it you know you'll see that you can
animate or you can figure out how the
action is going to work without having
to do a lot of animating you can just
plop down your positions and you know
where things are going to go and it
makes production a lot smoother and it's
just really fun altogether
so thanks for sticking around and
hopefully we'll see you in the next
tutorial