Timing for Animation

By Harold Whitaker and John Halas

Focal Press, 2006

7½" x 9½", 144 pages

This is a reprint of a small 140 pages book first published in 1981.

It doesn't feel like a lot of books we currently find on the market, where the publisher contacted a potential author who signed a contract in which he agreed to write a full 300 page book with illustrations and examples and the kitchen sink in one year or so. At the last SIGGRAPH, the book sellers had their counters filed with a plethora of books. I browsed through all the books about animation and found out that most of them are just weak or plainly bad coverages of rehashed concepts already well covered in previously published books.

"Timing for Animation" is different. The authors mention that the book took 5 years in preparation. It shows. All the illustrations comes from a real application of each principle and was not just cooked-up on the spot. The whole book shows that the authors have a lot of experience in animation and each of the principles they show are the result of years of figuring them and devising solutions that actually work. The book is literally a recipe book. It contains 61 topics, each topic taking 2 pages of which one half of a page contains a few paragraphs of text and the rest (1 & 1/2 page) contain drawings illustrating the concept. There are no fuss or blah-blah in this book. Just right to the point explanations and illustrations. They are all well thought out and explains the each concept very well.

Examples of topics covered are : Animation and properties of matter, Force transmitting through a flexible joint, Getting into and out of holds, How long to hold, Timing to suggest weight and force, Timing to give feeling of size, The use of timing to suggest mood, etc. Even animation issues we would not normally view as timing related are rightly presented with timing solutions which is, sometime, quite revealing.

Since the main topic of this book is timing and not specificaly drawing, I think that almost everything in this book can be applied for 3D animation. There are a few exceptions though, three topics I can immediately think of: when they discuss speed lines, camera instructions and peg movements. There are very few discussion about animating on ones and animating on twos. Those are concepts that don't apply in 3D although speed lines, I guess, could be cleverly replicated in 3D for some particular situations though we get motion blur for almost free in 3D.

There are also concepts related to timing that will not directly translate to 3D animation, like the spacing charts. This said, apart from the charts themselves, the underlying principles of spacing and timing that are represented in the spacing charts are still totally valid and in 3D animation they indirectly translate into curves in the channel editor.

Also, even though animating in a 3D animation application, some animators will like to do some preparatory work before actually touching a 3D model for animation. The spacing charts are formidable communication tools either to someone else or to ourselves when taking notes while thinking about, and developing an animation sequence. The dope sheet (they call that the "phonetic breakdown strip") and the particular gestural notation to express volume and accents is also a good tool for planing an animation sequence. It can be done in a true dope sheet of course, but it could also be done almost as a doodle just to communicate the feeling of the sound track. Basically, most of the paper-based tools that the 2D animation industry developped are representation of some important animation concepts. If you look at them as a representation of concept rather than as paperwork, and get interested in the concept themselves, then it becomes applicable to 3D animation too. Rest assured, though, "Timing for Animation" spends very little space on those paper tools.

John Lasseter explains in the book' foreword that he used to pass around copies of "Timing for Animation" to animator at Pixar. Personally, the first few chapters made me understand a couple concepts about timing that I still didn't get until I read that book. For the rest of the book, it felt more like a refresher of concepts I already knew but finally presented in a clear way. Like always, what one gets from the book depends on the already accumulated experience. There is one caveat, though, the book is a little on the expensive side for such a smallish book.