TIMING - The 12 Principles of Animation in Games

[Music] hello my name is Dan I'm an animator and this is new frame plus a series about video game animation when you're trying to develop your critical eye for this stuff it really helps to be familiar with the fundamentals of the craft and it doesn't get much more fundamental than the 12 principles of animation for those of you who have not heard of them before what we call the 12 principles of animation were first laid down in a book called the illusion of life written by some ex Disney animators named Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston these twelve principles were essentially a collection of techniques that were established by the animators of those earliest Disney feature films and these principles form the foundation for the art of animation as we know it every animator working today has spent their career trying to master these basic fundamentals and in this episode I just want to talk about the first one which is timing animation is a time-based craft and that makes timing the most fundamental foundational principle of the 12 it's about measuring change over time timing is the speed or tempo at which an action takes place any action it could be how long each successive bounce of a rubber ball takes before it slowly comes to rest it could be the rhythm of a character steps it could be the time it takes for an enormous Colossus to get to its feet some actions have fast timing like the rapid punches in a fighting game or the sharp kick of a fired gun or the quick blinks of a character's eyelids other actions have slow timing like the leisurely descent of a paraglider the ominous opening of a darksouls door or the facial expression of a sloth very very slowly getting the joke on a surface level this is a straightforward obvious rule fast things happen quickly slow things take a longer time obvious right but this is the foundation upon which all of animation works and it gets more interesting as you start to build upon it because you can use timing to communicate all sorts of stuff like for example size consider the action of standing up from a seated position let's say it takes the average person about two seconds to do that but what if you wanted to make that person feel like an enormous Colossus to communicate that sense of scale and weight you could time the action to take much longer like maybe five or even ten seconds but this goes beyond just physics you can even use timing to communicate character and mood if you speed up the timing of that standing action you can make the character seem excited or maybe startled or if you slow the timing down you could make them feel tired or maybe depressed see this is what makes timing so fundamental it may be simple but it influences everything now you can think of timing in terms of seconds or half seconds but an animator is going to find it much more useful to think of timing in terms of frames the frame is the animators standard unit of measure for an old-school pencil and paper animator a frame essentially meant a drawing film runs at a constant 24 frames per second so assuming they were making a new drawing for every frame which they didn't always but let's just say they did that's twenty-four drawings per second the more frames or drawings and action takes to happen the longer that action appears to take now a lot of you might be used to thinking of frames in terms of a games frame rate where the number of frames the game renders per second is variable but that's a fundamentally different separate thing for the game animators workflow we still need a way to measure time in constant units so when we're actually animating characters we will think of frames just like those 2d animators did back in the day as a constant unit for measuring time at the rate of 60 per second this attack animation is 48 frames long snake drawing his assault rifle takes about 14 frames this conversational hand to gesture from Geralt takes roughly a hundred and forty frames you get the idea honestly it's just easier than switching two milliseconds another important animation concept to understand in relation to timing is spacing spacing isn't technically one of the twelve principles but it is very closely linked with timing to the point that these two concepts are almost always taught together in simplest terms if timing describes when spacing describes how in animation spacing is about how far something moves or changes from one frame to the next the bigger the change in position the faster that movement will appear so say we have a ball and it's gonna move from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen and it's gonna take 60 frames to get there so okay we know the timing 60 frames but how will it move from point A to point B it could travel with very even spacing where it covers the same distance each frame and appears to move at a very linear speed but what if the spacings started out being much closer together and then got further apart over time that spacing would make it so that the ball appears to accelerate starting much slower and reaching full speed by the end and we could use the same technique to make it appear to decelerate at the end as well by altering the amount of change you see from one frame to the next you can make some pretty significant alterations to the feeling and perceived speed of the movement one of my favorite examples to point to when explaining this principle is Shadow of the Colossus because timing plays such a huge role in shaping that game's aesthetic obviously the colossi themselves are large creatures and the slow heavy timing of their movement is instrumental in making them feel so enormous but that's just the tip of the iceberg look closer and you'll find that there is almost never a sharp quick movement anywhere in this game you're not gonna find any of that snappy nearly instantaneous smash brothers timing in here in this game even the small characters don't dart around everything moves with a softness and a serene sort of nobility and that aesthetic choice results in the entire game having this sense of majestic scale and importance even when there's no Colossus in sight that sense of majesty is achieved almost entirely through timing through making everything in the game move just slightly slower just enough to make it feel a little grander the animation timing and red dead redemption too tends to be relatively slow as well but in a more naturalistic way aimed at making its world feel more grounded in reality and some folks may have expressed frustration at that slower timing especially when it comes to actions that you've got to perform frequently not gonna name names but others have argued and I think correctly that this slower more thoughtful pace is what makes the experience feel so faithful to the western genre both in terms of aesthetics and gameplay and when you're creating animation for games you have to consider the gameplay effect to your animations timings gonna have for example most fighting game animations have very fast timing a lot of the attacks seem to happen in the blink of an eye look at how few frames it takes for Rio to go from idling to his elbow connecting with the opponent that's like three frames one twentieth of a second and that fast timing is what makes fighting game characters feel immediately responsive but it also means that players have almost no chance of seeing an attack animation coming in time to react to it the average person just cannot see and react to something in the span of three frames and this creates a scenario where players often aren't reacting to the opponent characters animations but predicting what their opponent is about to do based on positioning and instinct animation timing has not only shaped how these games handle but fundamentally defined how they are played but then on the opposite side of the spectrum you have games like Dark Souls Dark Souls combat animations have relatively slow timing with long recovery phases just look at the startup timing for this basic attack with a longsword that's about 30 frames from idle to the sword connecting 10 times slower than reuse basic attack and the lengthy recovery time that comes after every one of these attacks a degree of risk to each move to commit to an attack is to potentially leave yourself vulnerable so it's in your best interest to watch your opponent carefully choosing to attack only in the moments where you believe they'll be vulnerable and won't have a chance to punish you for that attempt darksouls teaches you to watch your opponent's animation carefully and strategize around it and again that's thanks in large part to the timing of its animations and Peck then there's games like super hot where time only moves at regular speed when you move or perform an action timing itself is a core gameplay mechanic here timing has always been an important principle in animation but for games it might be the most important principle of the 12 but yes I think that'll about do it for timing there are 11 other animation principles left to cover but we will talk about those another day if you want to see those future episodes as soon as they come out hit the subscribe button and consider supporting the show like all of these excellent patrons here thank you for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: New Frame Plus

Views: 180,121

Keywords: timing, spacing, 12 principles, principles, principle, learn, basics, fundamentals, animation, tutorial, explained, list, gameplay, New Frame Plus, New Frame +, New Frame+, Animation, Game Animation, Animator, Video Games, Daniel Floyd, Dan, Extra Frames, animate, Disney, Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls, Sekiro, Street Fighter, fighting games, Superhot, Extra Credits

Id: rHEJZXvFc5I

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2019