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Before I go to sleep, I'll go ahead and explain frame rate versus exposure for you.

Frame rate (traditionally) refers to the number of frames of film passing through a projector per second. Today, it's often abbreviated as fps. I personally work at 24fps because of my roots in projected cinema. It's also very common for animators to work at 30fps, though I find that terribly inefficient because the actual projector speed is approximately 29.97fps, so one must accommodate that 0.03fps margin of error.

Exposure, on the other hand, is how long each drawing is held over a number of frames. When we refer to 1s and 2s, we mean that a drawing is held (exposed) for 1 or 2 frames respectively. Most animators prefer working on 2s because it allows them to do half the work and get a virtually identical result. There are, however, cases in which one must use 1s to smooth a motion or gain certain desired effects. The binary relationship of 1s and 2s, however, is mostly limited to feature animation at the moment.

Typically, any drawing exposed for more than two frames is considered a "hold" meaning that no change is occurring over the given period. When I say 4s, others may say 4 frame hold. I find it to be an efficient method of plotting motions in the gesture stage.

This is where I break from western conventions. When I was working in Japan, it was not uncommon to shoot on 3s, 4s, 6s, or have holds up to several seconds (for long holds, I recommend what is called a dynamic hold which is a loop that does not change the pose one wishes to hold). This was mostly done to save time and money (it's a lot easier to draw 25 frames on 4s than 50 on 2s or 100 on 1s), but it's important to realise that the average viewer will not recognise the difference. Over the course of my time there, I learned to animate well with arbitrary exposures. That means that when less action is taking place, my drawings may be exposed on 4s or more, but when it's necessary I may animate on 1s. With Flash being so popular in the west, most exposures are interpolated or "tweened", but I won't get into that. If you get a chance, look into Bill Plympton, he famously uses arbitrary exposure in a very effective way (though he tends to take it to an extreme).

To make the point clear and answer your question:

For example, if I'm running 30 frames a second on animation, but only expose say, 20 frames of that, didn't I just waste 10 drawn frames in that second?

No, the point is that you make fewer drawings and achieve the same effect. As you've noticed, traditional animation is very labour intensive. Why not reduce the burden?

That's all until tomorrow.

slowtiger wrote:It's a book about animation. It contains lots of illustrations in full colour. I doubt that a Kindle version would suffice.

I have Tony's latest book (Animator's Notebook) on Kindle... it's useless on my device (Android phone), but viewed through the online Kindle Cloud Reader on a big monitor, it's better than reading it in a book (it includes all of the graphics, of course). Even better in a two monitor setup as you can have the book up on one monitor and TVPaint in a second and work through the exercises that way...

Whew, this last week was super busy at work. Been doing nightly human figure lessons online, sharpening my skillset there. V.Veidt I sent cha a skype friend request as well as my name in a PM, hopefully you got that. Looking forward to talking with you.

Just one more day and I'll be free for the weekend. As for figure drawing, this site offers pictures of models (human and otherwise) for life drawing. Photos aren't the best way to do it, but it's free and fairly simple. Try to get the poses in 30 seconds, you'll find that it will drastically improve the speed of your drawing process.

http://www.pixelovely.com/gesture/figuredrawing.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hey v.veidt, thanks for that reference, this is a cool little tool, especially for those who can't get out to figure drawing classes....

But how useful are those poses (and models too) for someone who needs to study what's going on underneath the clothes of everyday humans going about the business of living everyday lives? This to me looks like the primer 101 of how to draw kitsch. Eadweard Muybridge's Animals (and humans) in Motion is still the unsurpassed collection of photographs of locomotion most useful to animators.

I'm with you there.... there's no substitute for going out and drawing from life, real people doing real things.

I pointed this out to a student of mine not so long ago. We were standing by a window one story above street level and I told him to watch the people leisurely walking below us and how they all swing one arm more than the other and how they all hold their shoulders at different angles while walking. Not a single person walked in the way the Dick Williams' book demonstrates or any of the other so called classical textbooks of animation. This is why so many animators fall into such stiffness in their creations; the animation books told them that's how it has to be done. All any animator needs to see is happening around them, all day long. They need to be taught how to become keen observers of life. Anatomy classes are useful when they come with instructions of the names of individual muscles and bones and how they are all connected. These elements of the human form are far more pronounced on bodies of the aged and not so perfectly formed beauty queens and kings.

They're useful because one must learn to draw a pose before one can learn to animate; otherwise, the results are very rigid and look like cardboard cutouts. My focus is on gesture drawing, quick gesture drawing at that. That's why I linked to an applet that changes the picture after a set time. I'm just trying to prevent a newcomer from wasting hundreds of hours on detail when seconds of essence are far more important.

While that website is no substitute for drawing from life, it's an excellent tool for doing 5 or 10 minute warm-ups with 30 or 60 second gesture drawings... In addition, I like to just spend 15 minutes filling up a blank page (or monitor screen) with basic shapes like circles, spheres, cubes, cones, etc, drawing them from different angles, twisting them, etc., to get your mind focused on using these basic volumes and experimenting with how they fill 3D space.

v.veidt wrote: I'm just trying to prevent a newcomer from wasting hundreds of hours on detail when seconds of essence are far more important.

Always a good idea, without doubt.

idragosani wrote:In addition, I like to just spend 15 minutes filling up a blank page (or monitor screen) with basic shapes like circles, spheres, cubes, cones, etc, drawing them from different angles, twisting them, etc., to get your mind focused on using these basic volumes and experimenting with how they fill 3D space.

I do this with heads; I personally find it more helpful to warm up with a complex shape than primitives, though drawing the primitives often is especially helpful when just starting out. Pay attention Cloakndagger, doing what idragosani just suggested is the best way to develop consistency in drawing. It's one of the most important aspects of drawing for animation, so try to practise it a lot.

I am always amazed (and this happens in my classroom as well) that people step up to become animators with no knowledge of drawing. If a person can draw, what is the use of doodling geometrical shapes? If you can draw and want to learn how to bring motion to your characters, all you need is an animline and get going -- one key pose after another, spaced a few instances apart and then fill the instances with inbetween images, press the play button to see what you have wrought, fix it where it looks wrong and you are on your way. Just don't fall in love with yourself because it moves -- that's the least of it and quite frankly, it's child's play. When you learn to act; to make a character behave exactly in the way you want him to for a sustained amount of time, then that's when you can perhaps begin to think of yourself as a person who just might have some talent. Only I suggest that a beginner wait for such praise to arrive from others.

This is why I also suggest some experience in puppetry, and with Tangram or something in that line.

Puppetry: learn to express emotions with your hands, be it with a siple sock or with an elaborate marionette.
Tangram: I had this game as a child and spent days with just building silhouettes of people, then changing just the angle of a tilted head to create a completely different expression. One of the best preparations for animation, methinks, and one that can be directly applied when doing cut--outs.

Man, so much to go off of here. Thanks for the suggestions everyone. A few thoughts:

My order of priorities, at least in my mind or until I talk with v.veidt, is to learn to draw the human figure, then practice gestures, then practice nuanced movement as Paul suggested. The end goal for me is actually the nuanced movement, because stylistically I find subtle movement more dramatic and expressive than exaggerated motion. Though, I understand that to get there, I must start from the ground up and learn the human figure, and then poses, and then movement. Of course there's still a place for exaggerated movement, and I will utilize it thoroughly, but I respect the mastery that goes into the subtle.