It struck me last night as I was drawing frame after frame and I'd drawn somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 drawings that I didn't even have 30 seconds of animation. Because I really thought I'd drawn enough for 30 seconds, but I'm not thinking in frames per second but the effort of all that drawing.
Jones was right. Every drawing is only on the screen for a fraction of a second. I'm just starting to get a feel for what that fraction of a second is. The thing I've been concentrating on is the movement and acting. The squash and stretch of it. I'm not tied to a soundtrack, so I'm not counting frames. I'm not thinking how many frames make a second.
I'm working at 8fps, and I probably should be drawing at 12fps.
Eight drawings makes a second, 16 is 2 seconds, 24 is 3 seconds, and so on. 40 frames is only 5 seconds. And 80 frames is only 10 seconds. Now 8 drawings for a second doesn't seem too bad to me, but for some reason, in my mind, 80 drawings for 10 seconds is lousy. So, for 30 seconds of animation I need to have 240 drawings.
So, the question is, how long does it take to draw 240 frames? I'm not sure exactly, but I think it took me about a half hour to draw those 90 frames last night. In my de-evolved squiggle style. Is it more work then puppet animation? Oh yeah. You could say that. But I still like the results I'm getting.
And this is why I'm not animating at 24fps.
So, let's split the difference. If I'm gonna do anything more then a few seconds at a time I need to use some limited animation techniques. Including breaking down figures into puppets and animating them on different layers.
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