Animation...what I thought was black and white turns out to be a whole grey area.
Ever since I started my BA Degree in animation, we where always taught to either shoot on one's or to shoot on two's (one's and two's refers to the term of how many frames you need to capture to animate, for example, shooting on one means you need 24 frames to complete one second of film, while two's means you take 12 double frames to make up the 24 frames per one second) that's all there was to it, ad for the longest time that was my golden rule.
Since I began animating, I have found it more increasingly difficult to animate my puppets by this rule, shooting on ones made it move to fast, shooting on two's made them look slow and sluggish. Then, out of nowhere I thought to myself "This is Dragonframe I can play around with the frame rates, why don't I mix it up" I took one frame, then a double, then a single, then a double, etc... and out of the frustration and struggle, suddenly the animation fit the puppets, then I started to become creative, experimenting with movements on a singular puppet, speeding up or slowing down arches of movement to gain response times or behaviors you would "expect" of this kind of creature.
In some instances I would shoot the motions so slowly that upon playback I would end up removing frames and doubling others get the performance I wanted.
When I posted on social media to ask other stop motion animators if they also shot in a similar fashion or if I was unique in this regard, apparently not. Frank Harper from Aardman commented saying "everybody does this, sometimes its necessary" and Melissa Graziano-Humphrey from Bento Box Entertainment said "I alternate depending on what's needed. I usually do settles or extremely fast or fluid action on 1's and regular action on 2's. Generally speaking, of course. It all depends on what looks and "feels" best."
https://youtu.be/QbZswIjjTDM
Does that mean I'm a terrible animator? I don't think it does, especially since reading the comments of animators such as these. It does however make me wonder if animation courses of today mentions this outside of its one's and two's teachings, as a student you take what your tutors say as truth, only a few students might think to experiment with frame grabbing to get the animation they want, so should this be mentioned as a footnote instead? either way I believe if it is not taught, it should at the very least be brought up, especially in this digital age where you can now manipulate what you have captured and instantly play it back to see if it works.
Since I began animating, I have found it more increasingly difficult to animate my puppets by this rule, shooting on ones made it move to fast, shooting on two's made them look slow and sluggish. Then, out of nowhere I thought to myself "This is Dragonframe I can play around with the frame rates, why don't I mix it up" I took one frame, then a double, then a single, then a double, etc... and out of the frustration and struggle, suddenly the animation fit the puppets, then I started to become creative, experimenting with movements on a singular puppet, speeding up or slowing down arches of movement to gain response times or behaviors you would "expect" of this kind of creature.
In some instances I would shoot the motions so slowly that upon playback I would end up removing frames and doubling others get the performance I wanted.
When I posted on social media to ask other stop motion animators if they also shot in a similar fashion or if I was unique in this regard, apparently not. Frank Harper from Aardman commented saying "everybody does this, sometimes its necessary" and Melissa Graziano-Humphrey from Bento Box Entertainment said "I alternate depending on what's needed. I usually do settles or extremely fast or fluid action on 1's and regular action on 2's. Generally speaking, of course. It all depends on what looks and "feels" best."
https://youtu.be/QbZswIjjTDM
Does that mean I'm a terrible animator? I don't think it does, especially since reading the comments of animators such as these. It does however make me wonder if animation courses of today mentions this outside of its one's and two's teachings, as a student you take what your tutors say as truth, only a few students might think to experiment with frame grabbing to get the animation they want, so should this be mentioned as a footnote instead? either way I believe if it is not taught, it should at the very least be brought up, especially in this digital age where you can now manipulate what you have captured and instantly play it back to see if it works.
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