Still Can't Believe One Of My Favourite Story Artist Ariel Hug-Bees Answered Me 🫠 I Was Blessed!

Still can't believe one of my favourite story artist Ariel Hug-Bees answered me 🫠 I was blessed!

Hi, Ariel! Thanks for your blog, your works inspires me a lot. Have you got any sources to improve rhythm and timing skills in animatic?

Thank you! Hm, I don't think I really have any resources on learning about timing- it's kind of something that I learnt on the go? I think if you're starting out, using a musical sequence is a great practice because the timing and rhythm are right there for you! Having certain actions and camera moves on the beat of the song (or mickey mousing it as it's sometimes called) can help with the visual flow of an animatic.

I use a combo of storyboard pro and iMovie (lol) when I'm building animatics. You can get really into the nitty gritty of adjusting poses to sound when you work in timeline mode in SBpro, but for camera stuff you might want to use a different editing program that's more robust like iMovie or Premiere. I think for timing, it also helps to know a bit about how animation timing works too.

You ever see animation that looks kinda sluggish? Sometimes people wanna try techniques like smear frames or make really fluid animation that ends up looking kind of floaty and slow. I think that a lot of beginners tend to copy these techniques without understanding how they work first- key poses are everything. Focus on what poses and actions are needed to convey what you're trying to show (walking, gesturing, etc). Adding in-betweens can alter how we get to those key poses, so fiddling around with how long it takes to get to each key pose will really alter your timing!

I may not be the best at explaining this so I really recommend learning as much as you can about animation timing through videos, books, etc. Hope this was helpful!