Illusion of Life Week 3
Rhythm and Timing
Aim
This week, we focussed on how rhythm and timing are very essential elements for any animation or scene, in order to gain the attention of the audience and keep them engaged. My aim for this week was to create a series of experiments based on my own animation concept in order to explore the week’s theme.
Method
As I had decided upon the final scenario for the studio project, the timeline, concept, shot types, and camera angles in detail, I planned to go through my plan again and look at what scenes I was interested in creating in order to test the timing, pacing and rhythm of the scenes.
I picked up the most important scenes for my experiments, one was the last scene of the story, where the bird discovers the watch in the dump yard, opens up its secret setting and gets to know what the watch beholds within itself, and the whole environment lights up. I worked in the 2d version of the scene and created three iterations of this scene, in order to test the timings of the scene where the bird progressively approaches the watch as it is amazed by it, and unknowingly unlocks the secret setting of the watch.
Furthermore, I picked another scene, in which the father gifts the watch to his son and is giving the watch to him. The son is unaware of what the gift contains and wants the gift from his father. I tested the scene with different timings, and even movements in order to experiment and get to know what works best for the scene. The first experiment was normal in which the father and the son, both are trying to reach out to each other’s hands to give and take the gift respectively. The second experiment I created was to test a scenario, where I could depict that the child is very excited to hold the gift, as children are usually very excited to take gifts. The third scenario was a test of both movement, timing and emotion. In this experiment, I tried to portray another common scenario that parents do with their children while gifting something, which is trying to give the gift to the child and as the child tries to reach out to the gift, pulling it back in a teasing manner. I did this series of experiments in 3d. All these experiments conveyed different meanings to the viewer.
The third series of experiments was also done in 3d and was another scene, where the child after seeing what is inside the gift, drops the gift to the ground. In this experiment series, I tried to test out various timing and pacing scenarios for the dramatic dropping and falling of the gift.
Result
Testing the pacing of three different scenarios in this response, in both 2d and 3d enabled me to create various timing tests of the scenes which are most important to the 3d animation. These tests enabled me to learn how tinkering with timing is very important to any animation. In the end, I had experimented with three different scenarios of my 3d animation with three different types of pacing.
Reflection
Creating this week’s response enabled me to realise the importance of timing, rhythm and pacing of the animation. It also helped me understand that timing is one of the factors involved in helping to express emotion to the audience. Timing can be useful tool in order to create dramatic effects or to increase or decrease the value and standing of a scene in the animation. The correct timing is an essential tool in expressing thoughts in an animation. I also realised that various sorts of timings can often be used to convey various messages. Each variation in time can be used to convey a different message, even in the same scene.