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Question about animation.

Frame by frame? Har! Now a days, most of the higher end gear will let you "tween" so you don't have to draw any "in between". To an extent.

I miss the days of frame by frame. Hand drawn anything. Everything is digitally done now.

Ponyo and Redline are some of the latest projects of hand drawn goodness.

Frame by frame? Har! Now a days, most of the higher end gear will let you "tween" so you don't have to draw any "in between". To an extent.

I miss the days of frame by frame. Hand drawn anything. Everything is digitally done now.

Ponyo and Redline are some of the latest projects of hand drawn goodness.

How do animators get timing right? When a character is walking, swinging a sword, jumping, etc, how do the animators get the speed right so it doesn't look too slow or too fast? How do they know the exact speed of these movements? Since anime is hand drawn frame by frame it's not like they can just preview it to see if it looks right (like you can do in computer animation). So how do they do it? How to they always get the speed of every movement so perfect?

is another software that does this. Flash doesn't seem common in Japanese anime- Super Milk Chan is one of the few I can think of [not sure if the TV series was animated that way, but they had a short flash seriest hat preceded it online

Suzza wrote:

How do animators get timing right? When a character is walking, swinging a sword, jumping, etc, how do the animators get the speed right so it doesn't look too slow or too fast? How do they know the exact speed of these movements? Since anime is hand drawn frame by frame it's not like they can just preview it to see if it looks right (like you can do in computer animation). So how do they do it? How to they always get the speed of every movement so perfect?

I can't speak for Japanese animators since I don't know exactly how they do production for shows in Japanese animated studios. However as someone who is an animation major in my junior year at the art school I go to, I can inform you a bit based on what I've learned so far. First of all, even though me and every other animation major student have to do some kind of hand-drawn animation assignment, we either already learned or ended up being taught how to preview our work without needing a computer. One way we were taught is to simply take the drawings and flip them the same way you would handle a flipbook. That's about the most manual way of checking your work to see if it looks exactly as how you want it to look. Then there's constantly looking at the last drawing you did by flipping over the drawing you're currently working on under what's called a light disk. And then there's the camera stand. Though it's not attached to the stand, there's suppose to be a camera head where you can zoom or focus like with a regular camera and it points straight down to the light disk where you put the drawings on. In the studios (which are really classrooms, but that's what everyone calls them), these stands also have an small, but bulky monitor with a lunch box plugged into the monitor. The lunchbox basically provides the snapshots for each frame, whether you want it on 1s, 2s, or 3s (24 frames a second, 12 frames a second, or 8 frames a second).

That's all how we learn to preview animated scenes/cutscenes (or rather review to check and see what works and what doesn't). Now again, I'm not speaking for Japanese animators, so I don't know if they have these same exact equipments or if that's exactly how they learned. I'm just giving an idea of how they may possibly check their work without a computer based on what I'm learning. Anyway, as for how they get timing right, well based on what my teacher taught me this past week about what's important for any animator that makes a film with a story, they plan it. How do they plan it? Well I don't know what exactly the Japanese do or use, but there is something called an exposure sheet. It basically coordinates how many frames a character will perform a gesture in a scene, how many frames a background pan, or how long something zooms in or zooms out. The one thing I've learned recently is that when you're working with other people on a project, you all need to somehow be on the same page as far as planning how long any kind of motion, foreground or background, goes on in a scene. And having the same notes on exposure sheets for everyone to know helps a lot. Even if someone is assigned to do certain scenes on their own and have to hand in those scenes to to the staff, they probably have to write notes on the corner on the paper so that the person who that assigned animator hands their work to will know how to pace out the scene.

Even though we all usually see more of the end-result then the process behind an animation be it Japanese, American, or any other region, I assume the majority of Japanese animators had to learn to apply something similar to an exposure sheet. At any rate, I do hope that helps. Whether I was being very informative or not, it's certainly more refeshing than getting involved in a never-ending "agree-to-disagree" debate.

Toon Boom wrote:

is another software that does this. Flash doesn't seem common in Japanese anime- Super Milk Chan is one of the few I can think of [not sure if the TV series was animated that way, but they had a short flash seriest hat preceded it online

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I forgot how I found out about this, but I stumbled upon a behind-the-scenes of Shana of the Burning Eyes (or Shakugan no Shana, whichever rolls out of your tongue better) on Youtube and apparently J.C staff along with most other studios use different variations of the Retas pro software. If I remember correctly, any one of those softwares cost roughly $900, which is 1.5 times the price of Adobe flash CS3.